It never ceases to amaze that the amount of people that still purchase bottled water for home use. It's time to get educated here, come on people. Lots and lots, you are wasting time and energy, landfill space, and yes, money.
Today, reverse osmosis has come into existence. As a means of purifying the bottled water you are drinking, did you know that most bottled water manufacturers are using reverse osmosis? Many people are completely unaware of and it's a fact.
Soon, the benefits of reverse osmosis, everyone will know. For just a few years, Reverse Osmosis water system has only been manufactured for the household consumer. Until recently, for purifying non-potable water supplies throughout the world, it was used primarily by major corporations and the U.S. Government. It was, and still is, making it suitable for human consumption it is used on large military and commercial ships for purifying seawater.
Often described as filtration is Reverse Osmosis (RO), but it is much more complex than that. Because it is much easier to visualize using those terms, people sometimes explain it as a filter. For instance, how our blood feeds each cell in our bodies is the osmosis phenomenon. Nutrients actually pass through the cells' wall to sustain its' life, as our blood is carried into the smallest of capillaries in our bodies.
For example: By its' construction mimics a cell wall, then divide the jar into two sections and place water on both sides of the membrane to an equal level, nothing happens if you take a jar of water and place a semi-permeable membrane in it. But, you will soon notice that the water level in the salty side begins to rise higher as the unsalted side lowers if you place salt, (or other such dissolved substance), into one side of the jar. At work, this is the natural osmotic pressure. By the unsalted water passing through the membrane to dilute the salty water, the two solutions will continue to try to reach the same level of salt or equilibrium on each side of the membrane. Created by the differences in the two solutions, this will continue until the "head" pressure of the salt water overcomes the "osmotic" pressure. These days, there are several water treatment systems for making drinking water potable.
Many years ago, to reverse or exploit this natural osmotic process and use it to purify salty ocean water, researchers discovered a means. With a sufficient amount of pressure on one side of the membrane, they found that if they took that same semi-permeable membrane and fed salty water into it, they could actually "manufacture" clean water on the side of the membrane that has no pressure applied to it to overcome the natural osmotic pressure of the other side!