News release: “New analysis of industry data released today by the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch finds that almost half of all bottled water sold in U.S. retail outlets in PET plastic bottles now comes from municipal tap water supplies. Bottling Our Cities’ Tap Water shows that between 2000 and 2009 the share of retail-sold PET bottled water that is actually tap water grew from 32.7 percent to 47.8 percent. The data also reveals that the volume of tap water bottled in PET and sold in retail outlets increased almost twice as fast as that of spring water over the same period. In 2000, 449.3 million gallons of tap water were bottled, increasing 453 percent to 2.5 billion gallons in 2009. Over that same time, the volume of spring water bottled grew 194 percent from 922.8 million gallons to 2.7 billion gallons.”