Still Losing The Battle...

Just a quick rant here. I'm still upset that I cannot make any headway against the false idea that water must be bottled in plastic and bought on the shelf or it is no good. Not only that, but you cannot reuse those plastic bottles of water once emptied without shame for being cheap!
I live on a lake, and our water control laws and regulations make it impossible to do anything (legally) that would pollute our lakes. We have hard well water, which I think is perhaps even better than anything we could buy in plastic bottle. I grew up with the taste of well water, so I prefer the taste of well water to soft water or city water with fluoride and other chemicals in it.
Anyways, Dear Wife continues to purchase bottled water for her use at work. If she does not bring her water, they charge $1.00 per bottle of water in the vending machines. So, yeah, it's cheaper to bring your own. But when I ask why she just does not get a refillable water flask or thermos, or even just refill some of her bottled water containers, she just looks at me like I am from a different planet. "Nobody refills their water bottles at work. You just don't do that!"

I truly don't understand how we have become a society that pays big bucks for water treatment centers, pay more per gallon for clean tap water in our house, and then are convinced that we now need to buy water in one use, throw away and pollute the environment for hundreds of years, plastic water bottles?
And yes, I mean hundreds of years. I'm not a chemist, but I asked my new best friend, ChapGPT AI how long it takes for a plastic bottle to decompose in a landfill, and this is the answer I got:
"A plastic water bottle can take
450 to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill, depending on the type of plastic and environmental conditions. Here's a breakdown of the factors involved:..."

I have no doubt that everyone at the office where Dear Wife works all buy plastic water bottles and toss them out after first use. I have no doubt that people might be shamed if they, god forbid, should refill a bottle of water. I am wondering if anyone here on the forum notices this where they work, a kind of social pressure, to actually do the wrong thing (IMHO) and buy water in plastic bottles that are used once and tossed into the waste stream to pollute our environment for a hundred years or more?

Obviously, my rant does not apply to those who live in areas where the tap water is not safe to drink. I was stationed in Naples, Italy for 2 years and we had to buy bottle water for drinking and cooking because the local water was not safe to drink. And I mean really "
not safe to drink." In fact, the Navy would send out trucks with huge containers of clean water to base housing that our service members and family could refill their water containers with clean water and not go broke buying water for the family use. We called those tanker trucks "water buffalos". But that was the only place I have ever lived where I felt it necessary to buy bottled water.

Rant over. Thanks for any comments if you made it this far. Would love to hear other thoughts, for or against, on this subject of bottled water that affects us both in the frugal sense and sustainable life style.