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Sunday, January 6, 2008

Bottle or Tap?

Today I will give you two reasons why you should give up drinking out of plastic water bottles. Yep, I'm going to jump right into this! Plastic bottles are a big problem, did you know that? Well, just read....

1. Bottled water is no better than tap water. In fact, it can be worse.

From Whole Life Times:

“There is no assurance that just because water comes out of a bottle it is any cleaner or safer than water from the tap,” concluded a study of 1,000 samples of 103 brands of bottled water, conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in 1999. Nearly one fourth of the brands tested by the NRDC were found to have contamination on some level.

And then there’s the question of water quality monitoring, far more rigorous and regular for municipal tap water supplies than for bottled. While tap water is regulated by the EPA, bottled water is mandated by the FDA. The EPA tests tap water more often and for more contaminants than the FDA does for bottled water, including tests for coliform bacteria, E. coli and pathogens such as cryptosporidium and giardia.

And get this:

At least a quarter of all bottled water is taken directly from municipal sources. That’s right: the source of at least 25 percent (and some believe up to 40 percent) of bottled water is not the fairytale mountain streams depicted on the bottle, but rather your own municipal tap.
Whole Life Times


I have to admit, I am absolutely guilty of doing the following – I thought I was doing a good thing by re-using plastic bottles. But it turns out… not so much.

From The Green Guide:
Water aside, the plastic used in both single-use and reusable bottles can pose more of a contamination threat than the water. A safe plastic if used only once, #1 polyethylene terephthalate (PET or PETE) is the most common resin used in disposable bottles. However, as #1 bottles are reused, which they commonly are, they can leach chemicals such as DEHA, a known carcinogen, and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a potential hormone disrupter. According to the January 2006 Journal of Environmental Monitoring, some PET bottled-water containers were found to leach antimony, an elemental metal that is an eye, skin, and lung irritant at high doses. Also, because the plastic is porous you'll likely get a swill of harmful bacteria with each gulp if you reuse #1 plastic bottles.


OK, that’s all I’m going to say (or, share) about the water you’re drinking, but now on to #2

2. Plastic bottles create tons of waste (literally)

According to the report (by the California Department of Conservation), more than 1 billion water bottles are winding up in the trash in California each year. That translates into nearly 3 million empty water bottles going to the trash EVERY day and an estimated $26 million in unclaimed California Refund Value (CRV) deposits annually. If recycled, the raw materials from those bottles could be used to make 74 million square feet of carpet, 74 million extra large T-shirts or 16 million sweaters, among other things.

By the way, there’s an interesting exhibit by a guy named Chris Jordan which includes a large (60 X 120 feet) piece depicting 2 million water bottles. Why 2 million? That’s how many water bottles are used in the US every 5 minutes.


According to Greenpeace (and Wikipedia), there are several large trash vortexes floating around in the sea…. The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of an area the size of Texas swirling slowly around like a clock. This gyre has also been dubbed "the Asian Trash Trail" the "Trash Vortex" or the "Eastern Garbage Patch".

Check this out: Gyre Animation

How many plastic bottles do you think there are there? Have I turned you off to plastic bottles yet? Good! So now what will you drink out of? Here’s the solution – get something like Sigg’s aluminum re-usable water bottle (there are several other brands out there, but this one is available at Whole Foods, and that’s where I go) and fill it up with tap water! Siggs uses a taste-inert, water-based epoxy lining which leaches no detectable quantities of BPA (while other unlined aluminum and polycarbonate bottles do). So good for the earth, good for you! And not that you have to, but I encourage you to sign the Take Back The Tap Pledge! I did. :-D

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