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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Bottled water
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Antisocial Alto
Shipmate
# 13810
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
The real concerns with drinking water are how well the processes are controlled and maintained. And how the water gets from plant to your tap. The pipes in older homes/areas might leach contaminants.
Our water main is lead. ![[Ultra confused]](graemlins/confused2.gif) We have a Brita filter mounted to our drinking faucet and large filters on the showerheads also. I probably would never have thought about it before having kids, but apparently young children are especially sensitive to lead because of their developing brains...
Posts: 601 | From: United States | Registered: Jun 2008
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Kitten
Shipmate
# 1179
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
Hard water actually upsets my stomach. I have IBS so it might be related. Forgive me for not enjoying water that makes me ill!
I drink a lot of water and am lucky enough to live in an area where the tap water quality is excellent, but I find if I travel to other areas the water affects my IBS so I tend to drink bottles water when away from home
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Maius intra qua extra
Never accept a ride from a stranger, unless they are in a big blue box
Posts: 2330 | From: Carmarthenshire | Registered: Aug 2001
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Soror Magna
Shipmate
# 9881
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Posted
Bottled water is, with rare exceptions, just someone else's stolen tap water. And here in the Western world, we have a habit of PEEING and SHITTING into large bowls of drinkable water. And what's all this about drinking fountains? Can't anybody operate a faucet?
Posts: 5430 | From: Caprica City | Registered: Jul 2005
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Anglican't
Shipmate
# 15292
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
Bottled water is, with rare exceptions, just someone else's stolen tap water.
Can you unpack that thought for me?
Posts: 3613 | From: London, England | Registered: Nov 2009
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
And here in the Western world, we have a habit of PEEING and SHITTING into large bowls of drinkable water.
And we have fewer disease epidemics because of this.
However, using tap water is ridiculous, especially in dry areas. Water recycling should be more prevalent.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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L'organist
Shipmate
# 17338
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Posted
I grew up in houses with lead plumbing, as did my older siblings; only the youngest got to live in a house without lead plumbing before the age of 21. When we weren't at home school plumbing was also lead. Dammit, not only were the pipes lead but most of the paintwork too - I have very clear memories of some gloss paint being attacked with a blow-torch in the late 1960s and seeing small droplets of something dark (I suspect lead) bubbling out of the hot paint.
So you'd expect us to show some sign of the lead having got to us ... well, the youngest jumped through the fewest (and only the lowest) paper hoops. And only the youngest has suffered from anaemia.
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Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet
Posts: 4950 | From: somewhere in England... | Registered: Sep 2012
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pydseybare
Shipmate
# 16184
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
And here in the Western world, we have a habit of PEEING and SHITTING into large bowls of drinkable water.
And we have fewer disease epidemics because of this.
However, using tap water is ridiculous, especially in dry areas. Water recycling should be more prevalent.
Well this is kinda true. Sewers and sewage works are a way to purify drinking water, although this is something of a happy coincidence given that the original designers of the Victorian systems knew nothing of the reality of sanitation.
The problem is several-fold. First, the infrastructure is very old and very expensive to maintain (in most industrialised cities with victorian sewers). Second the sewers are often not water-tight. Third, the systems for treatment are not foolproof, particularly in situations of abnormally high rainfall. Finally, the industrialised sewer mentality means that we find it very difficult to imagine any other system that could work at an appropriate level of sanitation treatment without that infrastructure. Hence many hundreds of expensive projects around the world which are not maintained and do not work.
The largest problem with industrialised and centralised systems is that when they fail, they fail spectacularly. If we ever get to a situation where the funding for such infrastructure is not in place, we're screwed.
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"If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
Posts: 812 | Registered: Jan 2011
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la vie en rouge
Parisienne
# 10688
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Posted
People don’t just buy bottled water to drink when they’re out and about, in some places a lot of people also use it at home. It’s very common here. Paris tap water is *nasty* - very hard and full of chlorine. (Apparently there is some public health reason for this like we’d all die of cholera or something otherwise, but anyway our tap water tastes disgusting and wrecks my skin.*) Apparently there’s still quite a lot of lead pipes about as well. For that reason a lot of people here don’t drink water straight from the tap.
Nonetheless, if your response to tap water = nasty is to drink bottled water all the time, cue massive plastic waste. The bottles are recycled, but this still involves a vast amount of energy expenditure. I use a Brita-type filter, which is a much more ecologically sound solution (one plastic filter per month for the household rather than however many bottles to recycle). I have also been known to use a shower filter (filters chlorine which hurts your skin, not limescale, which doesn’t) but those things are kind of pricy so I don’t use them all the time.
*Seriously – if I don’t anoint myself at least once and sometimes twice a day with gargantuan amounts of moisturising goop, my skin gets so dry it cracks and bleeds. When I splash out on the shower filters, I don’t need any moisturisers at all. Paris tap water is vile.
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Rent my holiday home in the South of France
Posts: 3696 | Registered: Nov 2005
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An die Freude
Shipmate
# 14794
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Posted
Whereas I'm not certain of his sources, a Swedish journalist had a look at a similar situation in Sweden and did some maths on the carbon dioxide emissions of a bottle of water. Apparently, a sleeping person breathes out the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide of 167 bottles of 330 ml per minute. A regular jogger breathes out the equivalent of 2000 bottles per minute. Thus, holding your breath for 0.35 seconds means you've covered your bases for the carbon dioxide emissions of the water transports and the bottle.
So I somehow think there are better things to cut down on. With that said, of course it's one way of saving money and the world, but mind you, the time and energy we spent talking about it probably evened it out and put us at a negative. Hold your breath, everyone!
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"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable."
Walt Whitman
Formerly JFH
Posts: 851 | From: Proud Socialist Monarchy of Sweden | Registered: May 2009
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An die Freude
Shipmate
# 14794
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Posted
Ok, I returned to do the maths myself because it seemed unreasonable.
In 2006, the bottles for water in America emitted about 2,5 billion kg of carbon dioxide in production - not assuming any recycling. Divided by the 300 million citizens of the US (more or less), this means each citizen emitted 8,33 kg of carbon dioxide.
Supposedly, a human being exhales about 525 kg carbon dioxide/year. Thus, each citizen increases his or her carbon footprint by about 1,5 % compared to just breathing. However, with the same amount of carbon dioxide, we could sustain 5 more million citizens (breathwise) in the US.
I have not included water transports because transporting water by pipe, by human or by truck shouldn't make that much of a difference, it's still relatively inefficient but necessary systems.
I'm not sure whether or not this means it's a battle worth fighting or not, but I'm leaning towards the latter. It seems to be an issue of easing conscience rather than maximizing effect, especially given that a university could easily cut down paperwork to a tenth or so if there was a slightly higher tax on printing ink and paper. Still, I maintain that the best way to save bottles at universities would be to install beer pipelines straight from local breweries.
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"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable."
Walt Whitman
Formerly JFH
Posts: 851 | From: Proud Socialist Monarchy of Sweden | Registered: May 2009
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
Bottles are made from petroleum. Recycling is better than not recycling, but not making bottles in the first is better still.
Water filtration wastes water. Reverese osmosis itself uses water to flush contaminate from the filtres and send it along out to disposal. Said contaminate, now concentrated, needs to be disposed of. Not a further burden if tap water is simply bottled. But if it is filtred again, more water wasted, more waste generated.
Much bottled water is demineralised. Whilst the jury have not completely reached a verdict, the balance of evidence indicates is this is not good.
Water filtration waste.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by JFH:
Whereas I'm not certain of his sources, a Swedish journalist had a look at a similar situation in Sweden and did some maths on the carbon dioxide emissions of a bottle of water. Apparently, a sleeping person breathes out the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide of 167 bottles of 330 ml per minute. A regular jogger breathes out the equivalent of 2000 bottles per minute. Thus, holding your breath for 0.35 seconds means you've covered your bases for the carbon dioxide emissions of the water transports and the bottle....
If you hold your breath, doesn't the same amount of breath come out when you stop holding it as would have done anyway? Isn't the only difference that it comes out in a great rush?
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by JFH:
I'm not sure whether or not this means it's a battle worth fighting or not, but I'm leaning towards the latter.
If carbon were the only issue, this might or might not be true; but another issue is what plastic pollution is doing to the oceans and ocean wildlife, which, even if you don't care for other species for their own sake, feeds a lot of people.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Mama Thomas
Shipmate
# 10170
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Posted
Also, I wish I could link to some studies I read years ago about the fuel it takes and the wear and tear on the roads the transport of bottled water takes. Being out of the US for many years, I've noticed upon coming back how everyone seems to carry liquid around. In my youth, it would have been inconceivable that people would bring bottled water or pricy vacuum flasks to church.
People carry around 128 oz. kegs of insulated sugar water with them all the time. Some people carry around "coffee." It's just weird.
But bottled water IS a problem for people in areas that have clean water. I understand that in places where environmental protection is sketchy, like West Virginia, people need imported bottled water.
I shudder at the cost it takes to transport water from Fiji to convenience stores in the US heart land, from the plastic bottles made in China and transported to Fiji and then to the US, the fuel and labour of ship and container and other transport workers to get something most people in the developed world can get by turning on a tap and draining what comes out through a carbon filled bit of plastic from China/Germany/Sweden.
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All hearts are open, all desires known
Posts: 3742 | From: Somewhere far away | Registered: Aug 2005
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I'm with ken, here. I can't really be doing with water that isn't out of the Chalk.* It has a flinty taste that I miss when in soft areas, and some of the soft stuff has an almost slimy mouthfeel. And I think I have read somewhere that the harder waters are better for the heart. At Dover, the water barely needed any treatment before piping out to the taps, it was so pure. Definitely not the Ankh. I suspect that Folkestone was similar - there's no sign of a treatment works at the source.
As Kipling said of Sussex clay, we yearn for the stuff we are wrought from. It's what we are used to.
*Or, failing that, limestone**. There's a spring along the road from my sister's house in the Cotswolds which is nice. And I found someone filling bottles from a pipe in the Kent marshes near Sheppey. When I asked, she confirmed it was drinkable - "it comes from Essex". I really need to confirm how it gets there and why. It tasted as if it was from the chalk aquifer.
**When I was in summer school at Nottingham, the Sherwood Sandstone stuff wasn't bad. I've never been ill from water. Even the peaty stuff, which I don't like.
There is an exception with regard to the limestone - the spring at the foot of Malham Cove has a distinct metallic tang - being downstream of the old lead mines. Bit of a mistake, drinking that.
[ 04. February 2014, 20:07: Message edited by: Penny S ]
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
I get the argument about bad water and therefore bottles of water are required, but never the single serving size. We have a cabin where the well water is not okay, iron sulphide, and the lake water is probably questionable due to the 300 cabins around the lake. So we have refillable 60 litre carboys. A carboy is a bottle, typically like the ones you see on water coolers. In fact, we have a stand and take water out of it like with a water cooler, but we don't cool it.
It costs $2 per 60L fill with the reuseable bottles. The get a blast of ozone-containing water to clean them before refilling. So we're getting only reverse osmosis water and not buying the disposable bottles. And not using wee little 500 ml or 1L bottles. Shouldn't places with bad water do things like this and avoid single use bottles?
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I'm with ken, here. I can't really be doing with water that isn't out of the Chalk.* It has a flinty taste that I miss when in soft areas, and some of the soft stuff has an almost slimy mouthfeel. And I think I have read somewhere that the harder waters are better for the heart. At Dover, the water barely needed any treatment before piping out to the taps, it was so pure. Definitely not the Ankh. I suspect that Folkestone was similar - there's no sign of a treatment works at the source.
As Kipling said of Sussex clay, we yearn for the stuff we are wrought from. It's what we are used to.
*Or, failing that, limestone**. There's a spring along the road from my sister's house in the Cotswolds which is nice. And I found someone filling bottles from a pipe in the Kent marshes near Sheppey. When I asked, she confirmed it was drinkable - "it comes from Essex". I really need to confirm how it gets there and why. It tasted as if it was from the chalk aquifer.
**When I was in summer school at Nottingham, the Sherwood Sandstone stuff wasn't bad. I've never been ill from water. Even the peaty stuff, which I don't like.
There is an exception with regard to the limestone - the spring at the foot of Malham Cove has a distinct metallic tang - being downstream of the old lead mines. Bit of a mistake, drinking that.
Hmm I don't really remember what the water is like in Coventry. However, I would prefer to drink tap water, even harder stuff that I get here - but my IBS just cannot tolerate it I'm afraid.
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
Posts: 5319 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2012
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