8) WaterFiltering your tap water to remove chlorine and fluoride provides pure, clean, great-tasting drinking water at a fraction of the cost or environmental impact of expensive and wasteful bottled water that costs more per gallon than gasoline. The payback on a $60 water filter takes only a few weeks for most households. As an added benefit, there is no plastic bottle to leach harmful phthalates (which act as estrogen in the body) into your water. Drinking pure water from your home or office filtration system keeps toxins, especially heavy metals, out of your system and keeps billion of plastic bottles out of our landfills.
I know that most people in America (and around the globe for that matter), drink out of water bottles. But most people don't realize the harm water bottle plants cause to our environment and our economy. Water bottle plants go to a certain location where they believe the water source is great, like a spring, or a lake. It is from here that they extract the water from said water source, and pump it into their factory. Inside the factory, the water is treated and processed with chemicals to "kill the germs". But in the process of adding all these chemicals, they actually make the water more un-pure. Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water quality laboratories found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand! Some chemicals commonly found in bottled water are: toxic byproducts of chlorination, disinfection byproducts called trihalomethanes, bromodichloromethane, and many more; all of which are known to cause cancer!
Now that's not even the craziest part.....the bottled water industry is not required to disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. When in fact, this is not the case, as it is quiet clearly processed in a plant.
So aside from the health factors involved in buying bottled water, what about the environmental issues surrounding it? Michigan has some of the cleanest and purest water, flowing through trickling streams to meet up with it's beautiful and vast lakes. In the late 1990's, Nestle was permitted to build a plant in Michigan by Gov. John Engler. The contract was full of tax breaks and included a minimal licensing fee of $100/ year. Before the necessary permits were attained, Nestle started building the plant. When Nestle started pumping the water, they did so in mass quantities claiming that they were not draining the resources. The average amount of water being pumped by Nestle out of this one pump, is 100-300 gallons per minute!! The amount of damage that this can do to the surround forests and farmlands is immense. Almost immediately after Nestle began pumping, Farmers were noticing that their wells were running low, almost dry! The local Michigans took Nestle to court, and after a long, hard battle, they eventually lost the case. Now all this happened because our mass population thinks it's safer to drink bottled water, than it is to refill one everyday out of the tap.
There is also the cost of bottling water, compared to filtering your water from home. In fact, bottling water costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a single person can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Now that is a lot of water to be wasting because we believe the myth that bottled water is safer. The movie FLOW talks about our water shortage and who is controlling it. As we can all imagine, there are people all over the world who cannot receive or pay for clean water. Those are the people who are paying the highest price for water: Their lives. And it really seems like there must be a way to provide good clean water for these people, so why don't they have it? Well, as we learned in FLOW, there are 3 major companies that own the water; Vivendi, Suez and Thames; Which in turn are owned by non-other than our World Bank. Find this a little strange? You're not the only one! Unfortunately, what this means to our brothers and sisters who are dying for lack of water in Africa, is that they either pay the high price for treated water through these three companies, or they drink from the river, which is obviously contaminated with toxins.
What can we do to stop this cruel, unfair privitization of water? Well a couple of things; first and foremost, don't buy bottled water!; secondly, look into smaller programs of filtering and treating water like the ultraviolet water purifier. This purifier is used in many third world countries, such as India, as an inexpensive way to filter their water, therefore saving themselves from being under the evil power of the World Bank.
So please folks, everytime you think about buying a bottle of water fromo 7-Eleven, think twice, or maybe 3 times, about the real cost of that bottle of water.
Water privitization
The real cost of bottled water
Bottled water reports
Michigan/Nestle struggle
I know that most people in America (and around the globe for that matter), drink out of water bottles. But most people don't realize the harm water bottle plants cause to our environment and our economy. Water bottle plants go to a certain location where they believe the water source is great, like a spring, or a lake. It is from here that they extract the water from said water source, and pump it into their factory. Inside the factory, the water is treated and processed with chemicals to "kill the germs". But in the process of adding all these chemicals, they actually make the water more un-pure. Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water quality laboratories found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand! Some chemicals commonly found in bottled water are: toxic byproducts of chlorination, disinfection byproducts called trihalomethanes, bromodichloromethane, and many more; all of which are known to cause cancer!
Now that's not even the craziest part.....the bottled water industry is not required to disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. When in fact, this is not the case, as it is quiet clearly processed in a plant.
So aside from the health factors involved in buying bottled water, what about the environmental issues surrounding it? Michigan has some of the cleanest and purest water, flowing through trickling streams to meet up with it's beautiful and vast lakes. In the late 1990's, Nestle was permitted to build a plant in Michigan by Gov. John Engler. The contract was full of tax breaks and included a minimal licensing fee of $100/ year. Before the necessary permits were attained, Nestle started building the plant. When Nestle started pumping the water, they did so in mass quantities claiming that they were not draining the resources. The average amount of water being pumped by Nestle out of this one pump, is 100-300 gallons per minute!! The amount of damage that this can do to the surround forests and farmlands is immense. Almost immediately after Nestle began pumping, Farmers were noticing that their wells were running low, almost dry! The local Michigans took Nestle to court, and after a long, hard battle, they eventually lost the case. Now all this happened because our mass population thinks it's safer to drink bottled water, than it is to refill one everyday out of the tap.
There is also the cost of bottling water, compared to filtering your water from home. In fact, bottling water costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a single person can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Now that is a lot of water to be wasting because we believe the myth that bottled water is safer. The movie FLOW talks about our water shortage and who is controlling it. As we can all imagine, there are people all over the world who cannot receive or pay for clean water. Those are the people who are paying the highest price for water: Their lives. And it really seems like there must be a way to provide good clean water for these people, so why don't they have it? Well, as we learned in FLOW, there are 3 major companies that own the water; Vivendi, Suez and Thames; Which in turn are owned by non-other than our World Bank. Find this a little strange? You're not the only one! Unfortunately, what this means to our brothers and sisters who are dying for lack of water in Africa, is that they either pay the high price for treated water through these three companies, or they drink from the river, which is obviously contaminated with toxins.
What can we do to stop this cruel, unfair privitization of water? Well a couple of things; first and foremost, don't buy bottled water!; secondly, look into smaller programs of filtering and treating water like the ultraviolet water purifier. This purifier is used in many third world countries, such as India, as an inexpensive way to filter their water, therefore saving themselves from being under the evil power of the World Bank.
So please folks, everytime you think about buying a bottle of water fromo 7-Eleven, think twice, or maybe 3 times, about the real cost of that bottle of water.
Water privitization
The real cost of bottled water
Bottled water reports
Michigan/Nestle struggle
