Bottled water is so last millennium.

Even a salty old group of mayors has gotten hip to tap water - straight or filtered - amid a flurry of recent attention focused on the wasted resources, fuel and money inherent to bottled water. The U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution on the importance of municipal water at its June meeting, citing among other things, that:

- Plastic water bottles are one of the fastest growing sources of municipal waste; most aren't recycled

- In the U.S., the plastic produced for water bottles requires 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, enough to fuel 100,000 cars or power 250,000 homes for a year;

- More than a quarter of the bottled water produced (including Coca Cola's Dasani and Pepsico's Aquafina) comes from municipal tap water;

- Bottled water costs 1,000 to 10,000 times more than tap water;

- Water from U.S. municipal water systems must meet more stringent and much more frequently-monitored health standards than those for bottled water.

At home or in your favorite restaurant, the push for lowering the number of "food miles" to transport and store food by going local is now expanding to include water, and tap water is as local as it gets.

In Tucson, it's a mixed bag. Some restaurants serve water straight from the tap. Some filter tap water. And some have a bottled water service.

Tucson Water spokesman Mitch Basefsky stresses that water straight from the tap is just as safe, if not safer, than bottled water because all U.S. tap water has to meet standards for safe consumption. The rub is the taste, which can vary considerably, even within the same municipality. That's why many city residents and restaurateurs opt for a variety of filtration methods.

But, besides the fuels used to transport bottled water and the resources and fuels guzzled to produce plastic bottles, filtration methods can waste significant amounts of water. For example, reverse osmosis, which uses a membrane to filter water, can put 3 to 5 gallons of water into the waste stream for every gallon of water it produces, Basefsky says.

"I think what's happening is that a lot of people who have become concerned about global warming and our carbon footprint are now thinking about the waste stream that's created from not only from plastic bottles and glass from bottled water but also wasted water from filtration methods like reverse osmosis," he says.

U.S. residents now drink more bottled water annually - an average of 26 gallons per person last year - than any other beverage other than carbonated soft drinks, says Gary Hemphill, managing director of the New York-based Beverage Marketing Association.

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