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Stop drinking bottled water.


johnfp

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Good advice. It makes me ashamed to say I'm guilty of drinking bottled water quite a bit because we usually have a few around the house. My mother is a big fan of bottled water, for its taste and supposed cleanliness over tap water. But I know that bottled water isn't necessarily cleaner or better than tap water. In fact, much (or most?) bottled water is filtered or recycled tap water. Take for example Dasani:

 

Dasani - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Coca-Cola uses tap water from local municipal water supplies, filters it using the process of reverse osmosis and adds trace amounts of minerals, including magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt), potassium chloride (a sodium-free substitute for table salt), and common salt.

 

Yummy.

 

Tap water in a bottle, sold to you at a "discount" price. It's almost like (or is) a scam. And plastic bottles build up and get tossed quickly, filling up landfills without mercy. It's surprising the world hasn't turned into one big plastic dump from these things.

 

More often I drink boiled (tap) water from our Japanese hot water pot. This too wastes energy, more so than if I drank straight from the tap, but the water tastes just as good as bottled water and many of the minerals like calcium precipitate from the water. These are easily washed away with a little scrubbing and vinegar during weekly cleanings. I also use boiled water to make my coffee and tea.

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Coca-Cola uses tap water from local municipal water supplies, filters it using the process of reverse osmosis and adds trace amounts of minerals, including magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt), potassium chloride (a sodium-free substitute for table salt), and common salt.

 

What's really funny is ath the rate of just one of those stupid bottles a day at a buck a-piece a bloke could BUY an R.O. filter system and bottle their own in a glass or stainless container (which unlike the plastic one will not leach nasty chemicals into the water) in as little as a year for a small system.

 

Many of these suckers gulp down as many as 8 a day!!! That could buy one hell of a system!!!

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I buy the bottles, and re-use them. Proper fridge water bottles, also plastic, are much thicker and stronger, obviously use much more plastic to manufacture, and are no better. Indeed, they take longer to cool than the clear plastic bottles supplied for bottled water.

 

So, I buy a bottle of bottled water, and get a handy fridge water bottle for very cheap! I then proceed to fill it with my very tasty tap water, and pop it back in the fridge. I've got a few 2-litres, 1 litres and plent 500mls, the 500ml bottles I freeze, so when I go somewhere and I have to pack a cooler box, I just chuck in a few frozen water bottles to keep my stuff cold.

 

So, yes - I buy bottled water, but not for the water. I buy it stricktly for the bottles, which last longer, are cheaper, and use a lot less plastic than purpose-built fridge bottles. Which means I buy bottled water very rarely, because if you handle the bottles with the same care you would fridge bottles, they last very, very long - but in my fridge, not in the land-fill.

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Another thing to consider about plastic bottles is the estrogen mimic chemicals they give off. There is evidence these chemicals are doing much dammge both the the environent by creating sexually ambigous animals (fish especially), contributing to cancer, and even interfering with the developement of human fetuses. I remember hearing when I was kid the Roman Empire was brought to it's knees by lead poisoning. With things like estrogen mimics, teflon, and PVC will our sociaty be the one that was brought down by plastic poisoning?

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Another thing to consider about plastic bottles is the estrogen mimic chemicals they give off. There is evidence these chemicals are doing much dammge both the the environent by creating sexually ambigous animals (fish especially), contributing to cancer, and even interfering with the developement of human fetuses. I remember hearing when I was kid the Roman Empire was brought to it's knees by lead poisoning. With things like estrogen mimics, teflon, and PVC will our sociaty be the one that was brought down by plastic poisoning?

 

And this is why I laugh at people that buy bottled water because they believe it's healthier than the available from the tap:hihi:.

 

Now there are those like my father that actually are getting healthier water when they buy it. His well is contaminated from years of local farmers spraying DDT and other nasties. But since I bought him a multistage mechanical/chemical/RO system he's back to drinking well water. (He's had the filtered water checked and it has been deamed safe.)

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Another thing to consider about plastic bottles is the estrogen mimic chemicals they give off. There is evidence these chemicals are doing much dammge both the the environent by creating sexually ambigous animals (fish especially), contributing to cancer, and even interfering with the developement of human fetuses. I remember hearing when I was kid the Roman Empire was brought to it's knees by lead poisoning. With things like estrogen mimics, teflon, and PVC will our sociaty be the one that was brought down by plastic poisoning?

 

Yes, estrogen mimics in plastic... The thought ran across my mind as I was writing my post about bottled water too. I've tried to cut down some of my exposure to plastics over the years because of the worry about endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And unlike estrogen mimics or phytoestrogens in say plants and other foods, these don't seem to have any positive health benefits like the plant-based ones might (which can act as antioxidants, anti-cancer agents, or modify the immune system in a beneficial way...e.g., soy isoflavones, phenolic antioxidants, etc.).

 

Some of the estrogen mimics in plastics:

 

Phthalate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bisphenol A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Wonder how many of these are seeping into bottled water.

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Luckily my house has well water. It is delicious and when I go to my fathers, whom has municiple water, I can instantly taste the chlorine.

 

But there is a very simple way of treating that. If you have municiple water that has chlorine in it, take a pitcher and fill it up with water. Put it in the fridge without a top. The next day the chlorine taste will be gone. :)

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Or is there any other constructive way to treat the empty bottle?

 

What about new material?

Or innovative bottle design?

Over here you can make T-shirts and other things of it as long that the bottle you buy is a PET-bottle...actually to be more accurate you throw your bottles in PET-recycling bin and then it is cut in small pieces and send to China where it is treated to create material (forgot the name in english) to make T-shirt and so on and they are sent back to Europe as T-shirts...globalization...

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Over here you can make T-shirts and other things of it as long that the bottle you buy is a PET-bottle...actually to be more accurate you throw your bottles in PET-recycling bin and then it is cut in small pieces and send to China where it is treated to create material (forgot the name in english) to make T-shirt and so on and they are sent back to Europe as T-shirts...globalization...

 

Are you talking about fleece?

I saw a doco on the plane before also talked about using plastic bottle to make clothing material, that is ploar fleece...

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Luckily my house has well water. It is delicious and when I go to my fathers, whom has municiple water, I can instantly taste the chlorine.

 

But there is a very simple way of treating that. If you have municiple water that has chlorine in it, take a pitcher and fill it up with water. Put it in the fridge without a top. The next day the chlorine taste will be gone. :)

 

Of course you are assuming your well water isn't polluted by something you can't taste and that chlorine is somehow a bad thing. My well water is green when coming out of the well and reeks of hydrogen sulfide, iron sulfide, sulfer dioxide and god only knows what else. My dogs will not drink it and they like to drink out of the turtle pond! After it runs through filters, a water softener and a green sand filter it would still gag a buzzard. I wish I had chlorinated city water.

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I'm not assuming I know my well water is not polluted. Sorry to hear yours is. The point I was trying to make was comparing municiple water to bottled water. If you like the fresh clean taste of bottled water, which the biggest difference I can taste is the chlorine, leave the container opened in the fridge for a while and it will lose the chlorine taste. My well water taste like fresh mountain spring water.

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I'm not assuming I know my well water is not polluted. Sorry to hear yours is. The point I was trying to make was comparing municiple water to bottled water. If you like the fresh clean taste of bottled water, which the biggest difference I can taste is the chlorine, leave the container opened in the fridge for a while and it will lose the chlorine taste. My well water taste like fresh mountain spring water.

 

When I was growing up we got our water from a mountain spring, if you haven't drank it you can't understand how great it is. You are very lucky

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