Clean, pristine, and fresh. That’s how many bottled water companies often advertise their products. But here comes yet another study that reveals bottled water’s dirty secrets. Canadian researchers found that some popular bottled water brands contain lots and lots of bacteria — bacteria that could sicken pregnant women, infants and the elderly.

According to the Montreal Gazette** which reports on this study, researchers from C-crest Laboratories found “revolting figures” of bacteria in bottled water (via Treehugger):**

More than 70 per cent of popular brands they tested did not meet the standards set out by the United States Pharmacopeia, a non-governmental agency that sets safety standards for medications and health-care products.

The bad news: The dirty brands were not named and shamed. Why not? Well, the researchers say the point of the study was not to shame any company in particular, but to prod the government into setting higher standards for bottled water. Neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor Health Canada have set limits on the amount of bacteria allowed in bottled water.

The good news: All bottled water brands are easy to avoid — by simply opting to filter tap water and tote your own reusable water bottle. After all, you’d be doing your health a favor by BYOBottle-ing. According to one researcher behind the study, “some brands had as much as 70,000 [colony-forming units of bacteria] per millilitre – or 400 times higher than tap water.”

And if your own health isn’t enough to get you off the bottled water habit, make the change for the health of our oceans. World Oceans Day** is coming up on Tuesday, June 8! I actually got to celebrate this day a few weeks early, because Los Angeles had its Kids Ocean Day on May 27. About 5000 local students gathered on Dockweiler Beach to do a big beach cleanup — picking up everything from beer bottles to cigarette butts to, you guessed it, plastic bottles.

Disposable plastics, especially when broken into smaller pieces by ocean waves, often look like food to marine animals, who eat the undigestible stuff and often die. And of course, trash-strewn oceans make for unhappy playing grounds. At the end of the cleanup, the kids created a huge aerial art message to “Sustain Life.”

The first easy step towards that for FilterForGoodians: BYO bottle if you aren’t already!

Photos top to bottom: elycefeliz,** Pandiyan,** Siel

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