With more than $7 billion spent on bottled water every year, the amount of plastic used on these bottles is quite overwhelming and compounds with each purchase. As the annual landfill pile up continues, the process of "going green" often stops at the price point. There is an alternative to bottled water, and it starts with filtration. Let's face facts: consumers can be adverse to technology they are unfamiliar with especially when it's consumed. Is the filter working? What does it remove? Who decided the proper filter for my area? Consumers are right to question. Truth is, water is a big money maker. The folks that offer filtration are contractors, for either commercial or residential applications. If you have ever had a bad experience with a contractor, you know that it's important to ask the right questions to protect your home or your business. When it comes to water, whether bottled, filtered, or municipally treated, there is a great deal of trust. We consume water every day and have no idea how that water was treated. Life goes on and whether you pick filtration or bottled, you're making a choice, every day. In the choice of bottled water however, you are contributing to what is now the largest piles of garbage that has ever been on earth. According to National Geographic in 2011, about 13% of the bottles going to landfill are recycled. An estimated 2 million tons of empty bottles end up as garbage, that's 4 billion pounds. We haven't even begun talking about emissions from all the deliveries: roughly 50 million barrels of oil annually. Is this sustainable? I answer with a confident no. Bottled water may have filled a need for when filtration technology was limited to plant operations, but now, one can find a sophisticated filtration system under one's own sink for a price less than what is spent on bottled water, I think we owe it to ourselves and our planet to give this some attention. Eric Jacobson is an account executive with Atlas Watersystems, Inc., Waltham, Mass. and is a monthly contributing Water Purification author for the New England Real Estate Journal's Green Building section.