080713 Cocktails, Anyone?

What could be better during the hot, sticky months of summer than reaching for an ice cold bottle of water? It is hard for most people to comprehend that something so simple and filled with common sense could be so bad for both them and for the environment. However, changing just a couple of habits can make grabbing that refreshing bottle of water as healthy as it would appear.

First, ask yourself where that water comes from. No matter how serene the spring pictured on the packaging, the majority of bottled water comes from the municipal water system. This means that any living organisms in the water should have been removed but not other chemical by products. Many people do not realize just how many chemicals are involved. This spring the major news agencies picked up the story of just one category of contaminant – pharmaceuticals. To get enough of our medicines through our systems to have their desired effects, the doses run high. Most of it goes right through our systems to pass out through our urine and back into the closed system of the municipal system. Public water systems have been found to contain unnatural levels of estrogen, Viagra, epilepsy medicine, anti-depressants, and steroids along with other compounds too numerous to mention here. The only effective way to remove these substances is through reverse osmosis filtering which is considered too expensive to implement on a city size system. Each bottle of water you purchase has a better than even chance of containing a cocktail of medications, plus fertilizers, pesticides, chlorines and some much, much more.

Next, you have to consider how the bottle got to you. Somewhere a plastics factory which required light and heat and land had to take petroleum out of the energy supply to make and shape the bottle. Trucks burning hydrocarbons and emitting exhaust then shipped the bottles to the point where the water was pulled from the city water system. The water got bottled in a plant which also had to be lit and heated and have workers driving in and out. Then the water got trucked to a store where it crowds out space from local food producers filling a spot that needs light and so on. A lot of energy and greenhouse gases went into getting that bottle to you.

You finally get your water; refresh yourself and stand there looking at the empty bottle. You could separate it out into the recycle bin and feel good that you did your part. However, an awful lot of communities are like mine; they take all of the separated goods and dump them together in the landfill. Here at the Red Lodge, if I want to recycle plastics I pile them up until I head into a nearby city where I own two apartment buildings and pay a city recycling fee. The city professes that it recycles and I am looking forward to touring the facility later this year. If your community recycles, you should be aware that leaving the cap on the bottle may well cause it to be tossed back in the trash and sent to the landfill. While the bottle is recyclable, the cap is not and having someone uncapping all of the plastic bottles costs more than the finished recyclables are worth.

There are two schools of thought about all of this here at the Red Lodge. I have purchased an e-Spring water treatment system from Amway which runs my water through a compressed carbon filter and a reverse osmosis filter and hits the water which an ultraviolet light. With that I know my water is totally locally sourced and safer than what is sold in stores. I keep an e-Spring pitcher in the fridge and always have reusable e-Spring bottles chilled. My lady friend who likes buying organic food in the store but is afraid of the eggs the free range chickens across the street lay, turns up her nose at my water and goes to the store for bottles filled from the Latham Municipal Water System.

She does not want to hear it. Of course she is always running out of water, running through cash and feels out of sorts quite often. And I get to dispose of her bottles.

Oh, and when we were kids, we drank from the garden hose all summer.