TIP OF THE WEEK:
ENDING BOTTLED WATER ADDICTION WILL SAVE MONEY & ENVIRONMENT
BOTTLED WATER ISN'T NECESSARILY CLEANER: According to the San Francisco Chronicle and lawsuits from the Environmental Law Foundation, 40% of bottled water is really just repackaged tap water. Maybe that's a good thing, considering federal standards for tap water are actually higher than those for bottled water.
BOTTLED WATER AND OIL: Supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, according to the Container Recycling Institute. That's enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Add in the additional amount of oil it takes to ship the bottles thousands of miles from extraction source to recipient, and your drink of H2O could be categorized with the "Hummers" of the world.
BOTTLED WATER AND BIODEGRADABILITY: Buddha's bones turned to dust a long time ago. But if he had been a bottled water drinker, that plastic would still be laying around. It takes two minutes to drink a bottle of water, but it takes thousands of years for that piece of plastic garbage to go away.
SOLUTION: Buy a water filter and a non-plastic water container of your preferred size. Fill it up in the morning before you go to work or school. Do a quick online search, and you can also find affordable portable water filters for when you are traveling. You'll save yourself and the environment a lot of expense.
Mayor lifts tap water warning for north S.D.
By Lisa Petrillo and Bruce Lieberman
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
August 7, 2006
The city spigots are back on, and the threat of a tainted water supply has passed as quickly as it occurred this weekend. “The city water supply is safe,” San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announced last night, lifting a boil-water order for thousands of North County residents. Faced with the prospect of a contaminated water supply Saturday, officials ordered restaurants to close and advised residents of Rancho Penasquitos and surrounding communities to boil water before using. Last night, 24 hours after his emergency alert, Sanders declared the danger of contamination was over. “My actions were reasoned and done to contain potential health hazards,” Sanders said of the temporary shut-down and boil order. Many residents reacted to his unprecedented action not with panic but with anger, he said.
Residents were angry about not being warned sooner of potential health hazards. The scare began after a water main broke Tuesday in a neighborhood off Black Mountain Rd. “I’ve been drinking polluted water for days and days and days and nobody told me” said George Mitchell, 70, who believes he has been sickened by tainted tap water for more than 2 days. Mitchell lives 5 blocks from the neighborhood off Black Mountain Rd. where the water main break occurred and where E. Coli was discovered coming out of a house spigot of a near by house. “I’ve been sicker than a dog for two days. I’m not dying, but it’s not pleasant”, said Mitchell, whose symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea. At least three of his elderly neighbors have been stricken with similar symptoms he said. “I didn’t think I was l was living in a third world country”, Mitchell said.
Mitchell was one of more than 1500 people who called the city hotline Sanders set up Saturday night to answer questions from the public. The emergency warning included the communities of Carmel Mountain Ranch, Rancho Bernardo, Bernardo Heights, Bernardo Trails, Bernardo Oaks, Oaks North, Pomerado Park, and Lake Hodges. Many area restaurants forced to shut down Saturday night started opening last night, including Olive Garden in Carmel Mountain Ranch, where the usual line out the door was missing.
Health officials first detected two potentially dangerous substances in the water supply-coli form and E. coli, the bacteria associated with human and animal waste. Retests of the water supply showed no more dangerous levels of bacteria, city officials still do not know how the contamination occurred.
Most strains of E. coli are harmless and live in the intestines of healthy humans and animals, but some can cause severe illness according to the federal centers for disease control and prevention.
By Anahad O'Connor
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
June 28, 2005
THE CLAIM: Bottled water is cleaner than tap water.
THE FACTS: It's no secret that many Americans are suspicious of what comes out of their taps. According to surveys, public concern about tap water is in part why sales of bottled water have tripled in the last decade. But are people getting their money's worth?
NOT EXACTLY. While many large cities are required to regularly disinfect their water supplies and test for parasites, bottled water manufacturers are not.
Those regulations apparently make a difference. In 2000, for example, a study in The Archives of Family Medicine compared 57 samples of bottled water to the tap water in Cleveland and found that while 39 samples of the bottled water were cleaner than tap, more than a dozen had at least 10 times the bacterial levels found in the city's water.
Another study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1999, tested more than 1,000 bottles of water sold under 103 brand names. Two-thirds were deemed "good quality," while the other third were contaminated – including many bottles from popular brands. Poland Springs and Dannon, for example, had samples containing "bacterial overgrowth."
THE BOTTOM LINE: Bottled water is not always purer than tap water.
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