This is very much a cultural thing. Over here, you can easily get bottled water in glass bottles. The delivery services will pick up your tray with empty bottles to be reused. That's reuse after cleaning, not recycling!

Europe, I guess? I had a talk late last year with a local brewery (traditinal bavarian one, family operated since the 1400s). And apparently everyone, especially Coca Cola, is going for glass right now. To the point reusable glass bottles are an actual bottle neck for them. Mind you, depsite the Covid caused demand drop. That was quite an interesting fun fact for me.

One thing I miss about Germany is S.Pellegrino in glass bottles. Since I moved to Belgium it has been incredibly hard to come by glass-bottled water.

I've found glass-bottled water easy to find in Belgium, I buy cases of Ginstberg (they have both still and carbonated water) in glass bottles in a supermarket here in West Flanders.

I know at least a couple places where you can buy it (Huis Maria in Harelbeke, Vanuxeem in Ploegsteert, so both Flanders and Wallonia) so I would assume those to be widespread enough throughout the country.

To me coming from France it was Belgium that was the easier place to find glass-bottled water :)

I only shop at AH and Delhaize, the choice isn't that great there.

Can't you just drink tap water, or if it really tastes that bad use a water filter. The idea of buying a new bottle every time you want a drink of water seems insane to me!

I assumed they were talking about reused glass bottles. Here (so in Belgium) I buy cases of water bottles with a deposit and return them empty.

The bottles are reused, and the water tastes a lot better than at least my tap water (in Antwerp - the tap water comes from a stagnant canal used for merchandise shipping, and last year for example it turned green and smelled of algae for a while after a ship carrying fertilizer capsized).

I have a filter for cooking/making tea. However there's something about S.Pellegrino and others that makes it taste much better. And the filtered water has completely different taste in the first day vs the rest of the month.

And yeah, you usually give the bottles back. However, it's much more common in Germany than in Belgium, it seems. I have never seen a line to give the bottles back in Gent, unlike Berlin.

Filtered water? Sure, the filter cartridges are plastic, but I’d guess that you’d reduce your plastic usage in general.

Couple of options:

(a) I used to live in Malaysia where tap water wasn't drinkable as-is, but filtering and boiling made it drinkable and tasted just fine. Hot water dispensers are pretty standard to have in most Asian homes; just put the water through a filtering pitcher before pouring into the hot water dispenser.

(b) Subscribe to those 5-gallon big blue bottles and a dispenser. They get actually reused instead of downcycled.

Blue plastic bottles leach endocrine disruptors, either BPA or BP-S.

There are some pretty decent filters out there that are not crazy expensive, guess it depends on how bad the water is though.

Get a water filter and drink tap. They sell filters made primarily out of steel.

> I have to drink bottled water for water quality reasons

Why is your water quality bad?

Drink Voss? and re-fillVOSS bottles with distilled water?

You can get distilled water delivered in very large glass jugs (4 gallons i think?)

Some thought that distilled water may not be desirable:

https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientscha...

very minor concern vs. benefits you get.

This is mostly about dissolved minerals, carbonates etc, and you should be able to control trivially.

I know I would prefer to know exactly what's in my water.