USA Water Filter Blog

Another Saturday morning and hundreds of volunteers throughout our area are preparing to participate in the annual CIBC Run For The Cure tomorrow, to raise tens of thousands of dollars for cancer research.

While that is great news that we as a community can feel good about, Amy reports that she has discovered an exciting story appearing in Prevention Magazine that addresses some brand-new research results posted by the Moffit Cancer Center in Florida.

With a gleam in her eye, Amy states, “Here’s the good news. According to the Moffitt Cancer Center, 70 per cent of known cancers are avoidable because they’re related to your lifestyle!” Well, unless it was all a dream, these types of results have been printed before. We already know about our first line of defence – no smoking, eat right and exercise. The vibrant young lady replied with, “Yes, but even newer findings reveal there are some small, surprising ways you can squeeze even more cancer prevention into your daily life.”

Amy then began to list off what she learned from the article, starting with our drinking water. “Filtering your tap water can reduce your exposure to carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals. That was according to the President’s Cancer Panel in the U.S. that says that is a better way to reduce your exposure to cancer-causing substances than drinking bottled water because the quality of bottled water has been found to be lower than tap water.”

As she continued the anti-cancer strategy information, it became more and more enlightening. Next stop: your gas tank. “Stop topping up your gas tank! If the nozzle clicks off and you try to eke out that little bit more, it spills over, right? Well, according to these findings, that can work against you because you end up breathing in those fumes or maybe get some gas on your hands. That exposes you to a carcinogen in crude oil and petroleum products called benzene. So don’t overfill your tank,” she cautions.

Listening to Amy, everything tends to make sense, but then came the kicker.

“Keep up your coffee habit. People who drink five cups of caffeinated coffee a day have a 40 per cent decreased risk of brain cancer. And apparently coffee was a more potent cancer blocker than tea.”

http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/news/article/1245201

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his letter is in response to John B. Challinor II (director of corporate affairs, Nestlé Waters Canada) “Bottle water info wrong” letter, published in the Sept. 24 issue of The Chief.

First off I would like to commend the District of Squamish’s move to ban bottled water in municipal facilities, and extend accolades to staff technician Brooke Carere for leading this effort.

The facts of the original article may be debatable depending on whose statistics you read. It would seem obvious that Mr. Challinor, representing Nestle, a party who directly profits from the sale of bottled water needs to make his industry look good.

Facts, stats, and profit aside, at a fundamental level bottled water supports the privatization of a natural resource that we simply cannot live without. When we buy bottled water we use our dollars to support private industry.

If we can access clean water through private industry, there is less public concern placed on the integrity of our tap water, and preservation of our watershed. This opens opportunity for a two tier water system in North America that delivers clean water to those who can afford.

This two tier water system is thriving in non-industrialized countries, and Nestle, the world market leader in bottled water is setting tone here by selling it’s “pure life” product (which happens to be purified tap water with added minerals) in countries like Pakistan, Brazil, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Mexico where clean tap water is very limited. Sure Nestle may be working to reduce the amount of plastics in our landfill, as cited by Mr. Challinor, but if we weren’t drinking bottled water then we wouldn’t need to reduce plastics, because we wouldn’t even be using them.

Clean fresh water is a very precious resource that needs to be treated with the upmost respect and when it comes down to it we can’t drink money. I look forward to seeing and hearing how the district, in partnership with volunteers at the Climate Action Network, will continue to instil municipal confidence in our drinking water through this “take back the tap” campaign – keep up the great work.

http://www.squamishchief.com/article/20101001/SQUAMISH0303/310019961/-1/SQUAMISH/support-bottle-water-ban

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More and more colleges are banning or limiting the sale of bottled water on campus, and instead are installing filling stations as an alternative.

Campuses that choose to go green this way help reduce the tens of billions of plastic bottles tossed out and into landfills each year, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education. They also help decrease the petroleum used to bottle and transport this water around the country.

Yet, universities face opposition from food and beverage companies that award schools contracts and contribute money for financial aid, athletics, and other programs. For example, Coca-Cola donates thousands of dollars to the University of Vermont (about $480,000 this year) in exchange for the school maintaining a contract with the company, which sells Dasani bottled water. Only when the contract expires in 2012 can the college make any changes concerning bottled water.

Due to students voicing their opinion, DePauw University, in Indiana, earlier this year curtailed all on-site bottled water sales, per The DePauw. However, bottled water remains available at select school events. Additionally, students may transport their own bottled water onto campus. To reduce the use of bottled water, DePauw supplied hard-plastic, reusable water bottles to incoming freshmen. It also equipped the dormitories and various campus buildings with stations where students can fill and refill their own bottles. The ban means DePauw loses a revenue source. “It’s a cheap product that many people buy because it is a convenience,” says Steve Santo, the general manager of the school’s dining services.

Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania, however, is saving $5,000 a year from no longer supplying its groundskeepers with bottled water, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Instead, they provided them with refillable bottles. Also, the school’s students voted to remove bottled water from the meal plan, which led to a 95 percent decrease in consumption.

http://www.citytowninfo.com/career-and-education-news/articles/colleges-provide-alternatives-to-bottled-water-in-an-attempt-to-reduce-their-use-10100101

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The United Nations General Assembly is considering a historic draft resolution recognizing the human right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation” initiated by the Bolivian government. Other member states have been consulted on the resolution and the final text is expected to be presented to the President of the General Assembly.

In a letter sent to all UN Ambassadors and permanent missions, global water advocate and Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow urges a decisive and swift passage of the resolution.

“This would be one of the most important things the UN has done since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” says Barlow, who chairs the boards of the Council of Canadians and Washington-based Food and Water Watch. In 2008/2009, Barlow served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the UN General Assembly.

“It’s time politics caught up with reality,” says Barlow, noting that nearly two billion people live in water-stressed areas of the world and three billion have no running water within a kilometre of their homes. “It’s time states finally recognize water as essential to life and a fundamental human right.”

But this latest moved — backed by U.S. progressives — is viewed as disturbing by conservative activists such as political strategist Mike Baker.

“This is the Mother of all power-grabs on a global level and will surely be detrimental to U.S. sovereignty. And the news media are totally ignoring what should be the biggest news story of the year,” said Baker.

http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/un-seeks-control-of-world-s-drinking-water-warn-critics

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(Sept. 30) — If rivers are veins that have brought life to civilizations throughout human history, then poison runs in our veins today.

That’s the finding of a report published today in the science journal Naturethat says 80 percent of the world’s population — about 5 billion people — lives in areas where river mismanagement and pollution have led to a high threat to water security. With the world’s population predicted to increase to 9 billion by 2050, pressure on these precarious clean freshwater resources will only increase.

That might come as a surprise to a population used to getting clear, drinkable water out of even the rustiest tap. Many Western countries have spent billions of dollars over the years cleaning polluted waterways, but despite scattered successes, they still have some of the most stressed freshwater resources in the world. Because or water is cleaned before it gets to our tap, we tend not to notice.

“In the industrialized world, the water management strategy is to patch up the problems at the end of the pipeline rather than the underlying causes,” study co-lead author Peter McIntyre of the University of Michigantold Reuters.

In the United States, a dead zone the size of Massachusetts at the base of the Mississippi River illustrates the extent that Old Man River has been fouled by agricultural runoff and other pollutants along its 2,320-mile-long run. The Rio Grande is on the WWF’s list of the world’s most endangered rivers. And the great Colorado River doesn’t even make it to the ocean some years.

http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/water-threatened-for-five-billion/19655688

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Peter Gleick: I’ve been working on water issues for about 30 years, but my interest in bottled water has grown in the last several years alongside the growth of the bottled water industry itself. As sales of bottled water have exploded, the controversies over bottled water have also grown. Fiji water in particular is in many ways emblematic of the problems with bottled water: the high cost of production and transportation, and the advertising that’s required to sell it. It’s such a strange idea that it could possibly be an appropriate thing to do — to bottle water in Fiji and transport it all the way to the U.S. to be bought and sold. It’s an extreme example of the lengths we’ll go just to bring a product to the American consumer.

PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) is 100 percent recyclable, as the bottled water industry tells us over and over again. But recyclable is not the same as recycled. In the U.S. about 75 percent of plastic bottles are tossed in the landfill. And most of the stuff that’s recycled doesn’t get made into new plastic bottles. Instead, it’s shipped to China where it’s downcycled into secondary plastic materials like fiber filling. There’s a value to that, but there’s no reason why all of our PET bottles couldn’t be made from recycled PET. The technology exists. It’s a little more costly for the bottled water companies, but it would be less costly for the environment.

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/author-q-a-bottled-and-sold

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