Below is an article that I feel is very good at describing what problems can result from a nation that uses bottled water for much of their drinking water.
Contact: Martha Anderson 913-631-3615.
The Article:
Thirst for bottled water unleashes flood of environmental concerns!
By Krisy Gashler, The Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal
Once reserved for Perrier-sipping elitists, bottled water has become a drink of the masses.
Sales have quadrupled in the last 20 years, and rose almost 8% last year alone.
Marian Brown, an assistant to the provost at Ithaca College who works on sustainability initiatives, has watched this growth with dismay.
"More and more people, more and more entities on campus, even for special events, were starting to think, 'Gosh, let's do bottled water,' instead of putting out (pitchers) of water," Brown said. "It's like, 'God no, they're making it worse!'"
The problem isn't the water — it's the use of resources. It takes a lot of oil to make all those little bottles and ship them, sometimes halfway around the world. But Tom Lauria, vice president of communications for the International Bottled Water Association, said bottled water isn't the environmental bad guy.
Sales on the rise
There's no question that sales of bottled water are increasing.
According to Lauria's bottled water association, in 1990, 2.2 billion total gallons of bottled water were sold worldwide. In 2007, it was 8.8 billion.
In just the last year, wholesale dollar sales for bottled water grew 7.8%, to $11.7 billion in 2007, according to the bottled water trade group.
Increased purchasing of bottled water is good news, Lauria said, because much of the sales growth is coming from people making a health-conscious decision not to buy soda and sugary juices.
"We're finding that most of that growth is in category switching," Lauria said, citing consumer research. "People are making a decision at lunch to buy bottled water as opposed to something else. Some people want to reduce caffeine, sugar, many reasons."
The Container Recycling Institute found that between 1997 and 2005, sales of carbonated drinks remained relatively flat while sales of noncarbonated drinks, including bottled water, almost tripled.
Plastic water bottles produced for U.S. consumption take 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, according to a 2007 resolution passed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. That much energy could power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year, according to the resolution.
Cornell University professor and environmentalist Doug James said the irony of bottled water is that it's marketed as clean and healthy when its production contributes to unnecessary environmental degradation.
"Fiji water, for example," he said. "A one-liter bottle is taken out of the aquifer of this little island, and shipped all the way across the world, producing like half a pound of greenhouse gases so you can have this one-liter bottle of water."
The taste question
Another obvious issue in the consumption of bottled water is taste.
In some areas, tap water simply isn't drinkable, Brown said, and in those situations, bottled water is a useful resource.
Other consumers simply prefer the taste of bottled water, Lauria said.
"Consumers have lots of preferences and some people want mineral water for taste," he said. "Everyone has their own reasons for buying products. And some people have a preference for bottled water."
But, Brown argues, perceptions about the taste of tap water and realities about the taste of tap water can be very different things.
To test her hypothesis that tap water tastes as least as good as bottled water, Brown has been conducting a series of taste tests at Ithaca College in the past year.
In five blind taste tests over the last year, the tap water has won four times, she said.
The growth in advertising and consumption of bottled water has occurred "frankly, since the big soda companies bought up water," she said. "They would buy up the Dasanis, and they would buy up the Poland Springs, and you get into the huge marketing machines of the major soda industries, Coke and Pepsi, notably, and they take it to a whole different field."
Water and waste
Then there's the waste stream.
In roughly the last 10 years, the amount of polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles being recycled increased from about 775 million pounds in 1995 to about 1,170 million in 2005, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
But during the same time period, the amount of PET bottles going into landfills skyrocketed from 1,175 million to 3,900 million pounds.
Water bottles are a big part of that problem, Brown says, because there are so many more of them, and because in many states, water bottles don't have a redemption value like soda and beer bottles do.
Lauria said the focus on water bottles is unfair because they make up "less than one-third of one percent" of the entire U.S. waste stream.
"There are many other plastic objects that are in our lives that no one seems to be concerned about and yet it all needs to be recycled," he said. "As you recycle bottled water you should also recycle many other products that are in your refrigerator when you're done with them."
Brown said that better recycling rates of water bottles would certainly help, but even better would be for people to stop using bottled water when tap water will do just fine.
"Even if we can do a good job of separating and recycling water bottles, it still comes down to the fact that it's completely unnecessary," she said. "From a cost standpoint alone, people should be starting to think about, 'I'm paying $1.19 or whatever it is for a bottle of water that I could get free out of my drinking water tap?'"
Hidden costs of water
Strictly speaking, tap water isn't free — it costs about $0.00002 per ounce.
But single-serve bottled water costs between 1,000 and 4,000 times more, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Some cities, including San Francisco, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have banned city purchase of single-serve bottled water because of waste impact from the bottles and because it's viewed as an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.
On the waste reduction hierarchy, reduce and reuse should be above recycle, said Tompkins County Solid Waste manager Barb Eckstrom.
Even so, bottled water can provide a healthier choice in situations, like sports events, where people are going to buy drinks anyway, she said.
Brown reiterated that clearly "there is a place for bottled water."
"But for so many of us here in the Finger Lakes we're so blessed with excellent water systems, we need to at all costs preserve and maintain (them)," she said.
Doug James, a professor of computer science and computer graphics at Cornell University and a recycling advocate, found that of the 30 billion plastic water bottles sold in the United States in 2005, only 12 percent were recycled.
That left 25 billion bottles "landfilled, littered or incinerated,'' according to James' Web site.
James got so fed up when he couldn't find recycling containers at two locations that he thought should have had facilities for recycling - a lunch area at Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center - he decided to do something about it.
James and his students animated a "twenty-first century waterfall'' of plastic bottles recycled - roughly 100 bottles per second - versus bottles discarded - 840 per second.
"You see all these numbers about billions of this and so on and it's hard to put it into pictures,'' James said. "This is a very expensive sort of bar chart or plot of what it looks like in terms of what we actually do and what we don't do.''
Benefits of alkaline Water:
Ever sat by a crystal stream and had the urge to follow it to its source? It is natural for us to seek the source, to find that secret place where pure water seeps from the rocks and becomes a stream.
But have you ever pondered whether that water seeping from rocks is really pure? And whether pure water is really so good for a body genetically designed to accept anything but pure water? Today many health authorities question to drinking of pure water, because it is not natural, causing leaching of body minerals through osmosis.
Even the fable Hunza water, splashing blue from the base of ancient glaciers, has large amounts of pulverized colloidal minerals in it. Everything that ever fell on a glacier eventually emerges in the glacial melt. Yet the Hunzakuts lived up to 150 years drinking this water. Furthermore, crime was not known in their society.
Many studies have been made of these remarkable people, and every study has pointed to the water. But exactly what was it about the water that gave its life-enhancing ability? Like the healing springs of Lourdes, the Tlacote well of Mexico, the Nordeneau Caves of Germany and the Nadana Spring of India, Hunza water is negatively charged. It has undergone a natural process of ionization in its passage through the earth, and it is a different water at an atomic level. It is nature's greatest antioxidant, laden with negatively charged hydrogen ions. It clusters in smaller molecular groups, which hydrate the body at a far deeper level than our old familiar H2O. It is alkaline, which was our body's state at birth, a state that we once were able to easily sustain with the help of unpolluted natural spring water.
Keeping Germs out: or making them want to leave?
The final words of Dr Louis Pasteur were "The germ is nothing. The inner terrain is everything." So why should we drink this water rather than pure filtered water? Whether we drink pure water or not, we still ingest 8 million germs as we breathe. Dr. Victor Yu, specialist in infectious disease, states the war against newly evolved viruses is clearly being lost. Dr Russell Wolfe, of Quebec's Wolfe Clinic, a specialist in the study of water, goes further. He says that we have now entered a critical mass when it comes to bacterial warfare, and that our greatest weapon against this is an alkaline body. He says that the creation of an alkaline body is the single most important strategy we can pursue.
Changing Our Inner Terrain
Dr Pasteur's Inner Terrain refers to our digestive tract, our lymph system, and our blood and intercellular fluids. All of these systems must be protected at all cost. Dr Wolfe puts it very clearly; "There is only one sickness, one disease, and one cause. It is acidosis, the main cause of all illness When I say this, I mean ALL illness, because your inner terrain holds the secret to whether you are going to lead a healthy vital life or whether you are going to live in sickness and disease."
He likens our inner terrain to the inside of a refrigerator. Go home, turn off the refrigerator, and watch what happens. Your food begins to break down through fermentation and putrefaction. Mold and bacteria start growing. They didn't just sneak in when you turned off the power. They were always there. They just changed through and environmental shift- a change from a low-temperature alkaline environment to a higher temperature acid one. Cold water is more alkaline than hot water. Therefore a cold refrigerator alkalizes and protects foodstuffs.
If your internal terrain is not in proper balance, it will become a perfect breeding ground for bacteria; just like food in a warm refrigerator. The Hunzas who drank their daily alkaline water lived long and peaceful lives partially because their inner terrain was always alkaline.
terrain, but the negative charge of the water acted as a very powerful antioxidant. When compared with Vitamin C, a common antioxidant, negatively charged water is thousands of times more powerful because it acts at an atomic level rather than at a molecular level.
Many women worry about taking too much calcium supplement, believing that it may lead to calcium deposits. Let us get this straight. All calcium deposits within the body have been found to have been leached from the body and not from nutritional calcium. The true cause of calcium deposits is lack of hydrogen, alkaline minerals and proper cleansing, which precipitates a state of crisis, causing calcium to be commandeered away from body tissue and bones due to acidosis.
When calcium deposits are found in the breast, for instance, this is your first warning sign that your body is crying out for a happier inner terrain where there is no longer any need to adjust acidity to alkalinity through leaching of our bones. Dr Wolfe says that calcium was pulled out of your bones to help put out the acidic fire in your breast. He says that when we are talking about cancer of the breast, of the ovaries, or liver, or cancer anywhere in the body, these are areas already in the grip of severe acidosis.
For more information on alkaline water and pH buffering minerals and barley grass juices:
Martha Anderson
913-631-3615
