USA Water Filter Blog

Being green, of course, is both unbearably chic and increasingly popular among Americans. An annual study on Green Brands has consistently found that fully 75 percent of Americans think that it’s “somewhat” or “very” important for them to buy from green companies. This is all corporate marketing departments needed to hear, and many companies are suddenly finding a “green” angle on every product they market, even on products as improbable as headsets and trans-fat-laden snacks.

Called “greenwashing,” the process involves exaggerating a product’s green credentials in order to attract eco-minded consumers. It’s rampant now: consumer groups are being kept busy exposing a number of improbable and even dangerously deceptive marketing claims: meat companies using the label “all natural” on animals fed antibiotics and hormones; breakfast cereals called “all natural” while also chock-full of genetically modified (GM) grains, and appliances that insert the word “green” into their marketing language despite offering no demonstrable energy savings.

It’s easier for some companies than others. While it’s pretty easy to read the list of ingredients in a box of cereal, where greenwashing gets tricky is when it’s committed on a far wider scale – such as in buildings, cars and commercial developments – and the deception is mixed in with truth: sometimes rather a lot of truth.

http://news.thomasnet.com/green_clean/2011/08/02/green-oxymorons/

 

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In the time it takes you to read just this one short sentence, over 8,000 empty water bottles are being thrown away worldwide.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, in the U.S. alone, more than 67 million plastic water bottles are discarded each day. That’s enough empty plastic water bottles to…

• Fill 5500 garbage trucks each day.
• Bury Manhattan Island one foot deep each day.
• Wrap around the planet 149 times each year!

Not easily degraded, empty plastic water bottles have become a major contributor to worldwide pollution.

In fact, water bottles make up a sizable portion of the garbage patch of discarded plastic swirling in the Pacific Ocean just a few hundred miles off the coast.

This enormous plastic “stew” is currently larger than  twice the size of Texas and growing rapidly!

The waste issue is not the only problem. According to the Sierra Club, the U.S. alone uses 1.5 million barrels of oil to produce all the water bottles we toss each year.

And along with oil, comes unwanted toxins. The processing of plastic water bottle releases toxic compounds such as nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide, and benzene into the environment.

http://waterfilters.mercola.com/drinking-water-filter.aspx

 

NSA Water Filters

Unfortunately, you can’t always depend upon schools to protect your children against unsafe drinking water. When schools get their water from municipal supplies, as many do, they’re not required to test for toxins.

If your child attends an older school with lead-soldered pipes, he or she may be drinking lead contaminated water. This highly toxic metal can flake off into the water, or simply leech into the water as it sits in the pipes over weekends and holidays.

According to a 2010 National Geographic report, a nationwide investigation discovered that the drinking water in schools in 27 states was contaminated with lead and other toxic substances from lead-soldered pipes installed before 1985.  However, I have no information that the water supply at your child’s particular school contains lead.

As bad as lead is for your child, it’s not the only potential concern with your school’s drinking water. In 2009, the Associated Press analyzed school drinking water data from the Environmental Protection Agency and uncovered some disturbing findings.

About 100 school districts and 2,250 schools nationwide were found to have drinking water that violated federal water safety standards, including one out of five schools with well water.

What did they find in the water? Lead, pesticides, and toxins such as coliform bacteria, copper, arsenic, and nitrates. It is for this reason that I suggest packing water for your child for school.

http://waterfilters.mercola.com/drinking-water-filter.aspx

 

NSA Water Filters

Your children need healthy water when they head out to school and play, just as much, or even more so than you or me. Children need three times as much water per pound of body weight than adults. As their immune and detoxification systems are not yet fully developed, any ill effects from contaminants in the water are far more impactful to children’s bodies. Lead in particular is dangerous for kids. Studies show that fluoride, added to most public water supplies, can actually increase your child’s absorption of lead. Pesticides and herbicides are beginning to show up in school drinking water supplies as well. Since developing children are less capable of fully removing them from their bodies, researchers are increasingly suspecting them as one cause for the exploding number of cases of autism and ADHD. As attention deficit and hyperactive behavior in children have been linked to changes in levels of thyroid hormone, so are irritability and aggressive behavior. Pesticides and herbicides are proven to adversely affect thyroid hormones.

http://waterfilters.mercola.com/drinking-water-filter.aspx

NSA Water Filters