Do you think you're above falling for marketing gimmicks? Do you scoff when you see the dripping wet scantly clad female falling all over the average looking guy holding a bottle of whatever the ad is selling? So do I. Do you still drink bottled water? If you do, I guarantee if you read on, you no longer will. It's easy to fall in love with bottled water. First of all it's convenient. In a time when everyone is moving at a rapid pace, from the stay-at home mother racing to drop the children to school so she can get to the gym and still have time to pay bills, to the top executive heading out of the office to face the traffic, everyone is busy. We get it. The bottled water company gets it. Secondly, everyone is health conscious. When a six year old can tell you what low-carb means you know that you've found yourself a trend. Again, we get it. Guess you who else got it? That's right, the bottled water company. Now, if what these companies were trying to sell was actually real and not an image built on the very real situations and concerns of our changing world, we would have less of a problem. However, when companies can make billions of dollars on marketing a natural resource, while polluting the environment, it's time to get angry. Sales of bottled water, a concept that was practically unheard of 40 years ago, have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, faster than any other kind of drink. The Beverage Marketing Corporation estimates that US bottled water consumption jumped 25 times from 1976 to 2007, from 354 million gallons to more than 9 billion gallons. Global sales continue to rise about 8 per cent annually, and in developing countries even more about 18 percent a year in China. About a fifth of North Americans rely exclusively on bottled water. In other words, the world has developed a dependency on this commodity, a dependency that is as needless as it is baseless and one that hastens our arrival to the point of no return. Here are a few outrageous facts. Manufacturing of plastic bottles uses enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Shipment of those bottles of water chugs out even more greenhouse gases. We spend hundreds of times more for them than we do on tap water. Most of the bottles are not recycled. And the punch line: about 40 percent of bottled water comes from municipal water supplies. It's just tap water. That last sentence bothers you doesn't it? It bothers you more than any facts we could provide about the pollution involved in manufacturing