USA Water Filter Blog

The jokers at Bottled Water Matters have another one of their YouTube videos up defending the industry. This one deals with the criticism that the bottled water business subsists on “manufactured demand.” It’s got all the amateurish animation and none of the humor of an early Trey Parker and Matt Stone short.

This is ridiculous. This anthropomorphized bottle is arguing that because people buy bottled water voluntarily, they want it, and therefore the demand isn’t manufactured. But whether people want it isn’t the relevant question. We should be asking why they want it, and whether their reasons are any good.

Some people might want bottled water because it fills a need that they don’t really have. One might be under the misapprehension that his life would be better if he drinks water from Fiji. Others might want bottled water because they think it’s the only way to fill a real need, even though it isn’t. Some people think bottled water is the only safe, clean option and they’re wrong.

In those cases, the question of whether the demand is “manufactured” by advertising or just driven by misinformation is beside the point. These people are just making bad choices as consumers. But this spokesbottle would rather confuse people about the semantics of “manufactured demand” than disabuse people of their bad reasons for buying bottled water because it works for the bottled water industry.

http://www.good.is/post/is-the-demand-for-bottled-water-manufactured/

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Water used to be just a source of mere hydration, but over the last decade the bottled variety has undergone a makeover. Enriched with all sorts of ingredients, from vitamin C to lemongrass, the beverage appears to offer a smorgasbord of health benefits, but truth be told, so-called “functional water” is more the work of clever marketing than a means of disease prevention.

Health for Sale
With the help of health buzzwords and smart packaging, beverage companies are taking advantage of our obsession with quick weight-loss solutions and wellness products. (In Japan, even logic-defying “diet water” is for sale.) This has caused bottled water sales to skyrocket.

In 2009, Americans ingested a whopping 8.5 billion gallons of H20. In fact, soda is the only drink Americans reach for more. Although the Food and Drug Administration is charged with regulating bottled water labeling, beverages that claim to energize, increase mental focus, improve memory, prevent heart disease and blast fat can be found on store shelves across the country.

http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/08/30/the-truth-about-vitamin-water-do-functional-beverages-wor/

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The global bottled water industry is worth tens of billions of dollars, and a new book is highly critical of it. It’s called “Bottled & Sold,” and it’s by Peter Gleick. He is co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland. He’s also a MacArthur “genius” award winner for his work on water issues.

Gleick says there are a lot of reasons Americans shouldn’t be drinking bottled water: our tap water is good, and plastic bottles are expensive, take a lot of energy to manufacture, and take up a lot of space in landfills. But, Gleick says, people are drinking more bottled water, not less. Americans now buy tens of billions of bottles every year.

KALW’s Hana Baba brought a few empty water bottles to Gleick’s office and started by asking him why Americans drink so much bottled water.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/kalw/detail?entry_id=71205#ixzz0yAxxx4F3

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First it was Central Florida University, which built a 45,000-seat football stadium with no (that’s right, zero) water fountains. And at their very first game in September 2007, 18 people went to the hospital and another 60 were treated at the stadium for heat-related problems. I describe this remarkable story in Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.

Then, the sports arena that hosts the Cleveland Cavaliers removed its drinking water fountains. The only way for thirsty fans to get water was to wait in line at the concessions counters for a free small cup or pay $4 for bottled water or try to drink water from the bathroom faucets.

Now the 100,000-seat Michigan Stadium, at the University of Michigan (the “Big House”), has just reopened after renovation and they’ve announced that no one can bring water into the stadium. Instead, fans must buy $4 bottled water at the 40 concession stands, find one of four “hydration tents” (whatever those are), wait in line for a free cup, or try to find one of only 28 water fountains (one per 4,000 fans). I’ve looked at the stadium website and the official stadium map: the concession stands are listed, but not the location of the water fountains. And in what seems more like a bad joke than an actual benefit, the University has announced a promotion for the Wolverines’ home opener on September 4th: the first 25,000 fans through the turnstiles will receive a commemorative plastic bottle of commercial water. Oh boy.

It is time to stand up and demand that our public places and spaces have clean, working, water fountains. It used to be that no city in ancient Greece and Rome could call itself civilized unless public fountains were available for everyone. Even today, when our tap water is remarkably safe and inexpensive, we need water in our public areas.

Water fountains are perfectly safe. There are no public health recommendations to close water fountains, nor (so far as I can tell) any scientific papers with evidence of the transmission of disease from drinking water fountains. Might it happen? Sure. Though as I’ve said before, that sneezing, coughing guy in the arena seat next to me is likely to be a far bigger health threat. And the quality of bottled water is less well monitored and regulated than our tap water.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/where-did-our-water-go-tr_b_691926.html

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There’s a continuing saga in Tallahassee, FL that has gone on for many years, which is representative of similar sagas that are taking place across America. It all revolves around the water specifically the water that is filtered and treated by municipal water quality divisions in every city and county throughout the nation.

A Tale of Two Separate and Independent Inquiries:

Unknown to each other for many years, two healthcare professionals in Tallahassee, FL began their independent research around the quality of Tallahassee drinking water. The author of this articleis an Integrative Health Consultant who chose to focus on the unintended consequences, toxic side effects and collateral damage caused by two standard operating procedures long in place at the municipal water quality division in Tallahassee, FL. Dr. Ron Saff focused on the myriad chemicals, contaminants and toxins that find their way into the water by various means and from a multitude of sources. Quite fortuitously for the citizens of Tallahassee, their paths crossed when they were both opposing the siting of a biomass incinerator last year in Gretna, FL.

One of the major components and preferred method of water treatment throughout the USA has been the standard chlorination procedure, which has been in use for many decades. It was first utilized over 100 years ago, and since WWII has been the primary disinfection treatment by virtually every municipal water district in the land. What’s inherently defective about this method of disinfecting water? And, that is its only purpose disinfection.

What other toxic side effects does chlorination produce? Did you know that there is a direct correlation between chlorine and depression? Repeated exposure to chlorine, in both its liquid and gaseous form, can greatly contribute to physically induced chronic depression. How do we know this? Many allopathic and alternative healthcare practitioners have recommended to their clients to stop drinking the tap water and begin drinking distilled or activated carbon filtered water, which are both free of chlorine.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-in-the-world-are-they-by-Dr-Tom-Termotto-100828-579.html?show=votes

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The environmental movement has always encouraged individuals to change their lifestyles to help the environment. But how much difference could individuals actually make if they changed their behaviours en masse?

A lot, according to the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council. A simple series of no-cost to low-cost lifestyle changes could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 15 per cent if adopted universally over the course of the next decade.

NRDC says the measures it recommends are not costly. In fact, most save people money.

The NRDC suggests relatively simple things we can change and adds up the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that would result. For the U.S., emissions could be reduced by 1,000 MMtCO2e (million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent) through the recommended measures, an amount equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of Germany.

At 590 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, Canada produces a little less than 10 per cent of the emissions of the U.S. and has a little more that 10 per cent of the U.S. population. To get a sense of how these measures would impact Canada’s emissions, I simply divided the projected U.S. savings by 10.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/change+wasteful+ways/3458484/story.html#ixzz0y58NV7LP

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Bottle water is less popular than it was just a few years ago, and the producers might have themselves to blame. A new study finds that nearly half the bottled water produced in the United States is filled with municipal tap water.

The report comes from the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch. Their research shows that filtered tap water made up 47.8% of the bottled water packaged in 2009. That figure is up from 32.7% in 2000.

The group’s director issued a statement where she said, “more and more bottled water is basically the same product that flows from consumer taps, subsidized by taxpayer dollars. It’s then poured into an environmentally destructive package and sold for thousands of times its actual value.”

Research by the Beverage Marketing Corporation shows the sale of bottled water increased sharply from 2002 to 2007 but has since fallen.

http://www.ktul.com/Global/story.asp?S=12972227

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But you probably know this already. Water is uncool. Yes, it’s true. You can’t drink mere ‘water’ anymore. It must be volcanic, Alpine (or Himalayan or any number of other mountain ranges) ‘spring water’ that was supposedly provided by some happy smiling peasant living a pure and simple lifestyle, who harnessed it by filling his bucket from a cascading waterfall. His happy smiling wife then bottled it for your pleasure, just before she ventured outside to milk the mountain goats. Well, that’s how the sales pitch goes.

As a child, if I were thirsty, I would head for the tap to fill a glass with water. As I got older, I even remember putting my mouth against a tap in the gym to drink from. Everyone did it. Very unhygienic I know, and health and safety regulations do not allow such a thing today. Mouths against tap probably isn’t a good idea, but the water itself was of perfect quality. Tap water in the UK remains perfectly drinkable to this day.
These days, however, it is way too uncool to be seen to be drinking tap water.

Somewhere along the line, some company thought it would be a great idea to try to sell bottled water to the masses. How ludicrous. Just who on earth would pay for drinking water when it was freely available from the tap. Well, it seems just about most of the population.

A plastic bottle of water that you have, you paid a ridiculous price for these days, you can’t leave home without one! And everyone in the gym carries one. Why fill up a bottle from home up with free tap water when you can buy it from the gym for a stupid price? Of course, the bottle has to have a trendy label. The label will usually state that the water inside fell to earth from snow white clouds hovering over the Andes, was then filtered through some timeless volcanic rock, mingled with the purest of air as it fell down some pristine mountainside and ended up in some famous ancient spring that no one has ever heard of.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/92164/water-gets-fashionable.html

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Americans are all wet when it comes to water. We drank 8.7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2008 (most recent available data) at a cost of more than $12 billion, according to the International Bottled Water Association. That’s a lot of money for something that flows so freely.

By filtering your water, it’s possible to tap into fresh-tasting water without pouring money down the drain and clogging up landfills with empty bottles.

Most of San Diego’s water comes from the Colorado River and contains a heavy load of dissolved solids. While this isn’t a health concern, it does affect the taste.

“At the end of the day, people want a water filter that makes their water taste, smell and feel better,” said Elaine Montemarano, general manager of Superior Water, a San Diego water filtration company.

Water filter systems range widely in price and sophistication. To find the best filter for you, determine how much water you use and how pure you’d like it.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/28/consumer-adviser-water-filters-are-decisions-taste/

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New research shows something as simple as drinking water before a meal can help you lose weight.

It takes a good amount of water — 16 ounces before you eat.

Researchers followed two groups of older adults on a low-fat diet. Half drank two eight-ounce glasses before every meal, half didn’t.

The study found those who drank the water lost more than 40 percent more weight after three months, and the people who continued drinking water before meals kept the weight off after a year.

Experts say the trick may work because the water helps fill your stomach and makes you feel less hungry.

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New research shows it’s safe for women to get antibiotics just before they have their babies via C-section.

Previously doctors thought the drugs could travel through the mother’s bloodstream to the baby, so women weren’t given the antibiotics until after the baby was out.

Doctors say the antibiotics are necessary because women are much more likely to develop an infection after a C-section than with a vaginal delivery.

Researchers found no harm came to the baby when the drugs were given an hour before surgery, and the results were better for mothers.

http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=13045004

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