Getting off the
bottle…
By Karen Digby, member of the
St. Francis Sustainability Team for the Forum bulletin March 10th, 2013)
So you love to drink
water. Great! This a healthy beverage for you. Drinking bottled water though, not so healthy
for your environment. People often have
the misgiving that bottled water is better for them, purer, without
contaminants and better tasting. This is
not necessarily the case however, as determined by a four year study conducted
by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). According to the study, which examined 103
different types of bottled water from the United States
Twenty five percent of
bottled water was also determined to be sourced from a tap rather than solely
from a pure spring or other clean source, according to industry and government
estimations. In fact, FDA water standard
rules do not apply to up to 60 to 70 percent of American bottled water as they
do to city water from the tap. For
example, tap water from the city must be examined for coliform bacteria at
least 100 times monthly, whereas bottled water requires testing for the same,
just once a week! Bottled water usually
must be tested for chemical contamination once per year, while city tap water
must be tested at a minimum of every three months.
Financially this is not very
healthy for the pocketbook either, as the bottled water habit can cost a
drinker anywhere from 240 to over 10,000 more per gallon for water in a bottle,
as compared to that from a tap. Additionally, empty bottles create 86 percent
of the waste material found in landfills or incinerators, while 1.5 million
barrels of oil are utilized, in the US
Would you like to break this unhealthy habit? Consider these solutions:
·
-purchase a
ceramic filter or activated charcoal filter for your kitchen tap or a filtered
water pitcher to make home made purified water (these will further filter the
water and make the water taste better if you do not normally find the taste of
tap water to be appealing)
·
-use a BPA free
reusable bottle or mug to carry your home made water around with you to sip on
during the day
-
refill these
reusable bottles at local purified water re-filling stations or drinking
fountains (the Meri Lou Murray Center in Ann Arbor ,
for instance has one of these stations, as do many buildings at the University of Michigan
·
Water is supposed
to be good for you. Trying these
solutions can help to keep it that way. Salud!
·
Bottled water,
what a waste.
http://www.treehugger.com/htgg/how-to-go-green-water.html
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/exesum.asp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Join your fellow parishioners as we build a Sustainability Project here at St.
Francis. Contact Scott Wright
(734-821-2121).
