[THS] !!!!! BAN BOTTLED WATER - Start at Home

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. 
It is a very important Green issue and everyone can easily take part - unlike most such issues where individuals are relatively powerless to do anything at all.
vbest regards,

THS Newsletter


http://www.theecologist.org/investigations/society/268733/bottled_water.html

Bottled Water

The Ecologist


Twice as expensive as petrol, three times the price of milk, and 10,000 times more
expensive than tap water. Is it worth it, and what impact is it having on our
environment?

Bottling out

In November 2002, a grassroots group in Grey Highlands, a village 40 kilometres
southwest of Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, won an important court decision that
could place restrictions on Ontario's water bottling industry.

Three judges of the Divisional Court ruled that commercial water-taking is considered
land use under Ontario's Planning Act and comes under the control of municipalities'
official plans and zoning bylaws. That means municipalities may no longer be
powerless when a commercial water-taking operation begins pumping millions of
litres of water out of the ground.

Commercial operators currently hold 50 permits that allow them to drain up to 11
billion litres a year from the province's aquifers, making bottled water big business
there.

MYTH 1 ‘Bottled water is safer than tap water’

A 1997 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) report cites a study
comparing popular brands of bottled water which showed that they were in no way
superior to New York tap water.

MYTH 2 ‘Bottled water is more healthy than tap water’

In 1997, a FAO study on "Human Nutrition in the Developing World" declared, the
claims that bottled "spring" or "natural" water contains near-magical qualities and
great nutritive value are "false". They admitted that bottled water may contain small
amounts of minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and fluoride, but pointed out that
tap water from many municipal supplies does too.

Bottled water trade growth

Growth in Annual Volume

1970   1 billion litres

            (300 million gallons)

1980   2.5 billion litres

            (650 million gallons)

1990   7.5 billion litres

            (2 billion gallons)

2000   84 billion litres

            (22.3 billion gallons)


BOTTLED NUMBERS

1.1 billion number of people living without adequate water supplies.

13.7 billion Estimated current value, in £ sterling, of the bottled water market.

0 the usual amount companies pay for extracting water.

10,000 the number of times more individuals can pay per gallon of bottle         water,
than they do for the tapwater in their communities.(NRDC 1999)

40% est. proportion of bottled water that is in fact tap water. (NRDC 1999)

1 in 3   of 103 brands of bottled water studied containing levels of contamination,
including traces of arsenic and E. coli.

1 the average price, in £ sterling, of 300ml of Evian.

1 the cost, in £ sterling,  of delivering 3,750 litres (1,000 gallons) of tap water to a
persons home (American Water Works Association).

1.5 million tons of plastic used every year to package bottled water.

89 billion litres of water consumed globally in 2001.

1 in 4   bottles of water is traded and consumed outside its country of origin.

30 billion litres of water allowed legally to be taken each year in Canada by a bottling
company.

25,000 total fees, in Canadian $ collected by the British Colombian government every
year for water extraction.

A Chinese puzzle

For Nestle, China is a potential “blue gold” mine. On average each Chinese person
currently consumes only 2 litres of bottled water a year, compared with 45 litres in
the United States, and 111 litres in France. But over the next five years the amount of
bottled water drunk in China is projected to grow 150 per cent.

For the world’s water giants, the mandate is clear: expand. The companies that
brought you Perrier (Switzerland’s Nestle - the world’s number one producer of
bottled water) and Evian (France’s Danone - the world’s number two ) are fighting
for dominance in the region.

In early April 2000, the Nestle Sources Shanghai Ltd bottled water manufacturing
plant was opened. It has an annual production capacity of 100 million bottles of
water. Where and how this water is sourced is unknown, but given the scale of the
demand, future pressure on community water tables looks set to grow exponentially.

Meanwhile, Nestle and Danone extract the water for next to no cost; package it in
polluting plastic; sell it to the poorest of the poor; and have the gall to pretend they
are saving lives. When did drinking water become a commodity, not a basic right?

And driving unsustainable demand for bottled water in China will force us to face the
fact that ‘we will only know the worth of water when the well is dry’ (B. Franklin).

Bottled Lies

LIE

In 1993, Crystal Geyser Natural Alpine Spring Water claimed to be "nature's perfect
beverage" which "begins as the pure snow and rain that falls on 12,000-foot Olancha
Peak in the towering Sierra. This pristine water is naturally filtered through the
mountain's bedrock."

TRUTH

North Carolina Agriculture Department disagreed, saying the company actually drilled
underground wells to pump water to the surface for bottling. Crystal Geyser and
seven other bottled waters were ordered to be removed from store shelves.

HALF TRUTH

The brand ‘Spring Water’ featured a picture of a lake surrounded by mountains on its
label.

COMPLETE TRUTH

The source for this water was actually a well in the middle of an industrial parking lot
next to a hazardous waste site.

“It struck me ... that all you had to do is take the water out of the ground and then
sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter, oil.”

Ex chairman of Perrier

“True conservation of water is not the prevention of its use. Every drop of water that
runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial returns to the nation is an
economic waste.”

Herbert Hoover (1926)

“When you drink water, remember the spring.”

Chinese Proverb

This article first appeared in the Ecologist February 2003
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not only that! Check out t he pollution that all your plastic bottles (and bags) produces:

http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/cleaner_air_water_land/468768/beyond_plastic_bags_stopping_plastic_pollution_at_source.html

Beyond plastic bags: stopping plastic pollution at source

David Hawkins

22nd April, 2010
Plastic Pollution Coalition is a new campaign calling for an outright ban on single-use
plastic products. Will you support them?

Plastic water bottles and shopping bags don't come with ingredient lists, but -
unknown to most - dangerous compounds contained in household plastics are
leaching into ecosystems and entering the food chain.

Plastic wastes choke seas across the globe. This form of pollution is one of the biggest
environmental problems we face, and it's only getting worse as plastic production
continues to grow. Joining hands with the likes of the 5 Gyres project and Rise Above
Plastics, an ambitious new organisation has set about trying to address this issue
head on, and it's gaining momentum fast.

While researching for a film about happiness in consumer society called American
Dream, Plastic Pollution Coalition co-founder Manuel Maqueda met anti-plastic
campaigner Captain Charles Moore. Sharing a love of oceans and sailing it was
natural they should end up discussing the vast problem of pollution in the sea.

His growing awareness of this issue led Manuel, along with Daniella Russo, Lisa Boyle,
and Dianna Cohen, to launch the US based coalition at the end of October last year.

'I didn't create Plastic Pollution Coalition because I know a lot about plastic, but
because I don't know enough,' he explains. 'Yet there are people all over the world
who know a little bit, or a great deal, and we're trying to build the platform for this
dialogue to start.'

Plastic Pollution Coalition is constructing the first online portal to discuss the problems
and bring various information streams together. Teaming up with other
environmental organisations as well as businesses, celebrities and individuals, this is
truly a group effort. Raising awareness is the first objective.

Toxic soup

With euphemistic phrases like 'marine debris' being floated around by industry
Manuel says 'it felt like there was a neurolinguistic war going on already'. PPC is a
focused, clear and concerted action against this kind of verbal legerdemain and the
shortsighted, unthinking approach it represents.

Manuel is anxious, but optimistic: 'Hopefully all this has just been a big experiment of
how not to do things. But what we see in the oceanic gyres is plastic waste from
products used five years ago. The problem is still ballooning.'

Phrases like 'The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' have become common parlance. But
this is a too-simple way to mentally contain a problem that is everywhere - no stretch
of water, no beach is free of microplastics.

However, due to ocean currents, in this case the Pacific Gyre, there is indeed a
particular concentration of pollutants and plastic fragments in this particular area of
the north Pacific. If you go there you won't immediately see 'a floating island of
trash'. Yet in this water there is more plastic than plankton; it has become a toxic
soup.

Health threats

Plastic fragments of all sizes have appalling effects on marine organisms, but perhaps
a greater threat to humans is encountered on a microscopic level.

One of the most common chemicals in plastics is Bisphenol A. This compound is an
endocrine disruptor which can mimic oestrogen and has been linked with an array of
afflictions as diverse as diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, thyroid disorders,
ADHD, infertility, erectile dysfunction, early-onset menstruation and obesity.

Bisphenol A and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs) can pass through the
placental wall and also enter infants through breast milk.

Manuel says, 'we are all contaminated. A newborn should have a chance in life to eat
healthy, uncontaminated food, but they are not given this choice anymore. There is
need for complete overhaul of production processes so that the precautionary
principle prevails.' Swift and decisive legislative action is needed to ban Bisphenol A
and other toxins such as antimony, found in many fruit juice and squash bottles.

It's difficult to locate the specific sources of these problems when they're completely
pervasive. 'Often these things can be counterintuitive, like the neurotoxic flame
retardants found in pillows.' And it gets more sinister: 'Plastic fragments also act as
attractor molecules for PCBs, DDT, insecticides and various other toxins, and they can
accumulate quantities of these substances a million times greater than that found in
the surrounding oceans.'

Major culprits are nurdles. These lentil-sized plastic resin pellets are the form virgin
plastic takes before it is processed. Manuel describes the way these are transported
and handled as 'criminal'; they are pouring into the environment through spillage
and waste. Dr Hideshige Takada, professor of organic geochemistry at Tokyo
University of Agriculture and Technology, has been examining these pellets for the
pollutants they carry. Anyone who finds nurdles on the beach is encouraged to send
them to him for analysis.

Plastic 'nurdles' - the feedstock for the industry. Copyright Steve Trewhella

The source of the problem

The Plastic Pollution Coalition is keen to point out that unfortunately, with plastics,
recycling doesn't really help. It is costly and ineffective, resulting in a low-grade
product that cannot be used for much and which will end up on the rubbish tip
anyway. A more appropriate term for this is 'downcycling'.

The best we thing we can do is reduce consumption significantly. 'We need to get to
the source of the problem - which is in our minds,' says Manuel. 'People need to
make the connection that you cannot throw away something that lasts forever.'

At the same time the industry needs to be made accountable. Producer responsibility
is crucial, whereas recycling puts the responsibility on the consumer.

Aims

The most common symbols of our disposable culture are beverage bottles, plastic
bags, coffee-stirrers, styrofoam - the most ephemeral of ephemera. But,
paradoxically, the chemicals in these items will be with us forever.

'I would like to see that we collectively give up single-use plastics, that these materials
are phased out. That's the majority of our plastic pollution. Plastic bottles, plastic bags
and food packaging are responsible for most of our plastic waste' says Manuel. This,
he says, can be achieved through raising consumer awareness and by campaigning
for anti-disposables legislation.

The tax on plastic bags in Ireland has proven to be extremely effective, for instance,
and we may take cues from several African nations that have placed strict bans on
plastic bags - with Rwanda even turning them away at the border.

Part of the basis for these radical measures is that in less industrialised countries
people have to live with their waste in a way we are not accustomed to in the West,
where rubbish is 'recycled' or carted out of site to landfills at home or abroad. At the
same time we need to design plastics that can be properly recycled in an
economically feasible manner.

So what can we do?

By taking the Plastic Pollution Coalition's Single-Use Plastic Emergency Response
(SUPER) Hero Pledge, individuals can help to bring these aims closer to realisation.
They preface 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' with 'Refuse', urging us to really think about
where our waste goes, and to refuse plastic products wherever possible.

Supermarkets and brands will react to consumer pressure. It's worth demanding they
reduce packaging, and asking how they intend to take responsibility for its effect on
the environment.

Meanwhile we need to lobby our governments to take strong action against toxic
plastic products. Manuel also encourages anyone in local groups or organisations
involved in this issue to join the expanding coalition - making strong connections in
the UK and Europe is the next step. So get involved!

'Ultimately we should move in the direction of producer responsibility, where
producers are responsible for the end-life of their products. At the moment what
happens to these products after use isn't the producers' problem, it's the planet's
problem. We have to reverse that equation.'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.theecologist.org/investigations/waste_and_recycling/268686/landfillonsea.html

Landfill-on-sea

Daisy Dumas

7th February, 2008
Plastic rubbish gets tossed away in far-off places that we rarely get to see. Daisy
Dumas assesses its impact on the world's largest floating landfill.

A challenge. Try, if you can, to spend at least five minutes without the company of
plastic sometime today. I'm warning you, it won't be easy. We sit on it, wash in it, eat
from it, drink from it, look through it, play with it and pay with it. It is more than likely
that there is some residing inside you. Plastics are literally everywhere.

Plastic facts

Almost every aspect of our lives is touched by plastics, so much so that:

In 1979, the manufacture of plastic overtook that of steel.

Today we use 20 times more plastic than we did 50 years ago.

Each year, 100 million tonnes of plastic are used worldwide.

We each dispose of 185lb of plastic every year.

What was once seen as the durable, lightweight, cheap and easily manufactured
answer to our needs and desires has now become an unwelcome ubiquity. We are
only just beginning to understand the extent of damage caused by the uncontrolled,
unparalleled and unexamined overproduction of plastics.

In the quest to produce a material that transports and stores effectively, we have
unwittingly created a range of products made from a substance that is totally at odds
with the environment. And having conquered the land, plastics are now taking over
the planet's greatest oceans.

The doldrums

The Central Pacific Gyre is the largest uniform ocean realm on the planet, stretching
over a vast 10 million square miles. Subtropical highs cause the slow, clockwork
rotation of the ocean, where a devastatingly calm core gently wanders with the
currents. Once synonymous with a sailor's nemesis, the area has taken on a rather
more sinister role as a site for the world¹s plastic trash. Trapped in these calm seas, a
toxic dump of floating seaborne plastic waste swirls and grows, constantly
accumulating substance.

At twice the size of France, this phenomenon was dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch (GPGP) by leading flotsam expert Curtis Ebbesmeyer, and is perhaps the single
largest body of pollution in the world; an aggregation of year upon year of discarded
plastic entering the Pacific Ocean. In this place plastic waste can rotate and linger for
over 16 years, its origin a multitude of shorelines, neighbouring waters and ocean
vessels. The doldrums have always been an area where flotsam collected. Until the
recent past, biodegradation has taken care of integrating much of this largely natural
waste into the marine ecosystem. Nowadays, however, 90 per cent of all marine
debris is anything but natural. It is, instead, plastic. Defying even the most rapacious
and stubborn bacteria, plastics slowly photo-degrade to a molecular level, at which
point further degradation can only be achieved by burning.

Between 70 and 80 per cent of the debris collecting in the Garbage Patch is post-
consumer waste from the land, mostly swept into the marine ecosystem by storms
and wind. Much of the remaining plastic is an unintended consequence of the mass-
fishing industry, as vast trawling nets, broken buoys and mile upon mile of plastic
cord and twine intermingle with plastic bottles, toys, trainers and cigarette lighters. A
smaller but nonetheless significant fraction of the debris is pre-consumer, often in the
form of nurdles - pre-manufacture pellets.

Given the nebulous nature of the GPGP, its rate of growth is hard to determine. I
think it is growing faster than we can predict. At the moment it is enlarging at an
exponential rate, increasing by a factor of 10 each year,' says Captain Charles Moore,
Founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in California, who in 2006 found
that in some areas of the GPGP, the ratio of plastic to plankton measured six to one.
It is likely to be 100 times worse in six years' time and similar to rates found off the
coast of Japan, where much of the waste originates.

Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, who is studying
the problem off Japan's coastline, has measured a three-fold increase in plastic
particulate pollution between 1989 and 1999, and tenfold increases in the past two to
three years.

Today, particulate pollution in the GPGP is at least as high as 100,000 pieces per
square mile.

Facts in the water

The remote Midway Atoll lies at the north-eastern tip of the Hawaiian archipelago. Far
from man, far from manufacturing plants and far from the prodigious demands of
modern culture, Midway should, by definition, exemplify a storybook desert island.

It is anything but. Surrounded by the GPGP, Midway could be mistaken for a landfill
site. Its beaches are littered with the harsh reality of extreme pollution, as carcasses
jostle with coke bottles and clumps of fishing nets lie discarded like seaweed. An
important albatross rookery, 40 per cent of fledglings hatched on Midway never leave
the island, instead dying from starvation.

Captain Moore's gruesome photo library bears macabre testimony to the first-hand
effects of seaborne plastic. Decomposed albatross bodies, their bloated stomachs
exposing horrific last meals of lids, nurdles and cigarette lighters, compete for space
beside unrecognisable turtles, their shells disgustingly disfigured from a life with six-
pack beer holders lodged tight around their middles.

Whether it be an algae-sifting whale or a fish-eating seal, small pieces of plastic are
mistaken for food at all levels of the chain. Algalita researchers have seen styrofoam
cups with bites taken out of them because they have the same texture as food.
Indeed, recent media coverage of washed-up rubber ducks from a massive dump in
the Pacific over a decade ago show telltale bite marks to their necks and abdomens.
Nurdles of all colours and sizes fool jellyfish, birds and fish into ingesting them,
blocking digestive and respiratory tracts and competing with scant nutrients for a
place in their stomachs. Microplastics have even come to be known as plastic
plankton - a befitting but twisted name to billions of indiscriminate filter feeders.

The figures speak for themselves - Greenpeace estimates that one million birds and
100,000 marine mammals die in the Garbage Patch each year. Individual species are
quite literally on the brink of extinction, the onset of which can be attributed solely to
plastic interference. We have counted more than 100,000 Laysan Albatross deaths in
a single year and it won't be long until species become extinct - there is a whole list
of endangered species and it is getting longer, says Moore. The species Captain
Moore worries about most is the Hawaiian Monk Seal, which he says faces certain
extinction if things don't change. It is not for lack of effort. But without removing
plastic from oceans, or halting their entry into the marine environment in the first
place, rescuers are fighting a losing battle. It is tragic It is so sad to see hard working
animal rescue centres treat animals and release them, only to find them washed up
in nets a few months later, says Moore.

Toxic sponges

Quite apart from physical implications, the biological impact is enormous. Not only
can larger plastic objects entrap, entangle and entwine pelagic wildlife, they also act
as floating islands and play a role in the colonisation of potentially poisonous new
habitats. Man-made toxins freely migrate both in and out of plastics, and small plastic
particles with high surface areas have the ability to absorb and transport a million
times the concentration of hydrophobic toxic chemicals (such as DDT and PCBs) than
that of ambient water.

Perhaps most disturbingly, plastics have the capacity to leach out the chemical
compounds associated with their production. So much so that the US Food and Drug
Administration used to term plastics indirect food additives. Plastics expert Paul
Goettlich of mindfully.org is a harsh critic of the current regulatory structures (or lack
thereof) for dealing with the production of plastics and their chemical components.
Despite what we are led to believe, he explains, the [plastic production] process is
never 100 per cent perfect. Logically then, there are always toxicants available for
migration into the many things they contact - whether these points of contact be
seawater, fish, birds or mammals.

Ironically, where man has failed to clear these finegrained toxic sponges from the
oceans, nature has erroneously stepped in. As Moore puts it an astronomical number
of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an
ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever
invented - the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the
toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that
leads, in some cases, to human beings.

The most common group of such chemicals are proven endocrine disrupters. These
substances interfere with the function of natural hormones, the most dangerous
manifestations of which are reproductive disorders and cancer. On land, studies show
that reproducive problems in sentinel species such as amphibians and birds - species
that reflect the health of their ecosystem - are giving us all the warning signs we
need, whilst the toxic effects of PCBs in humans is well-documented, going back to
work-related exposure in the 1930s.

The plastic goods market is expanding at a far faster rate than the infrastructure to
deal with waste plastic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it may be that the lack of action can
be traced to the relative economic dead-end posed by the problem. As Captain
Moore puts it: There is no economic resource that would directly benefit from this
process. We haven't yet learned how to factor the health of the environment into our
economic paradigm. We need to get to work on this calculus quickly, because a stock
market crash will pale in comparison to an ecological crash on an oceanic scale.

Short of filtering every drop of the planet¹s water, there is little we can do to turn the
tide on the GPGP. Workable solutions must lie in reducing our need and desire for
plastic and its subsequent entry into the environment, but plastic consumption in
Western Europe alone is currently increasing by four per cent each year.

Not in my back ocean

Though the Central Pacific may seem a million miles away, the GPGP is likely to
exemplify the future of many marine areas. According to Richard Thompson of the
University of Plymouth, while scales and densities differ, plastic pollution in Europe
has increased sharply over the past 40 years. Locally, we find that patches of debris
vary over time and depend on wind and tidal conditions. Concentrations of debris are
found, but at smaller scales of resolution than the Garbage Patch. It is entirely
possible that an accumulation similar to that could occur.

So, where can we expect to see the next Garbage Patch forming? It is not so much
about specific debris sinkholes, Thompson warns. It is the fact that debris can collect
in any number of hotspots around the world. Given that 40 per cent of the world¹s
oceans are subtropical gyres, not to mention the many smaller ebbs and flows of sea
currents, potential hotspots are worryingly abundant.

Dive below the surface of the problem, and it becomes clear that there is yet another
dimension to consider. A comprehensive study in Europe by Galgani et al, in 2000,
recorded plastic debris during 27 oceanographic cruises and using submersibles
down to 2,700m. The truth lurking in the depths was that some areas were
contaminated with more than 100,000 items per square kilometre.

There is no prospect of plastic particulate pollution going away quickly. Rather, two
trends are likely to increase. Firstly, fne-grained, smaller plastic particles will
proliferate through photodegradation. Although the potential environmental impact of
smaller debris and plastic plankton is relatively unknown, Algalita recently won a
research grant, allowing the team to begin work on the effects of microplastics on
zooplankton. Secondly, seabed, deepsea plastics will accumulate as larger objects are
fouled and worn, altering their density and sinking. The UN estimates that 70 per
cent of all seaborne plastic will eventually sink, sequestered to the depths of oceans
where a toxic graveyard will fester.

As Bill MacDonald of Algalita says, People don't understand that what they do can
affect the environment thousands of miles away. Perhaps they won't need to. The
grim reality is that a plastic garbage patch may soon be coming to the waters near
you.

Daisy Dumas is a freelance journalist

So, is biodegradable plastic the answer? In short, no. While bio plastics have an
application in modern life (especially in farming), they are limited in their effect. They
require high temperatures, a very specific pH and high levels of light to decompose,
but such conditions rarely occur in natural environments, let alone sea, where there
are lower temperatures and levels of sunlight. In an ocean environment, as in a
landfill, biodegradable plastic will remain intact, causing damage to wildlife and
ecosystems for many years.

This article first appeared in the Ecologist September 2007
[and was accompanied by several photos that would turn your stomach]