February 25th, 2010
Image: microbeworld.org
Bruce Rittman, director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University (ASU) recently gave a lecture to ASU students about the safety of our water supplies and degradation of the infrastructure of our nation’s water system. He referenced research from a paper he wrote back in 1984, which is becoming all the more crucial now, as we take closer looks at the safety of our drinking water, the necessity and dangers of chemically treating it, and the environmental and human health hazards posed by bottling it.
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February 24th, 2010
Nestle’s apparent quest to profit from sucking the earth dry of water may have hit a snag: people don’t seem to be buying as much bottled water anymore. Last week, the beverage mega conglomerate announced that revenue from its bottled water operations dropped 1.4 percent in 2009. In the grand tradition of corporate spin, Nestle’s public relations department had a convenient scapegoat for this turn of affairs: the recession. Read more…
February 18th, 2010
Image: javcon117
Metro Vancouver recently took on the task of promoting the consumption of tap water over bottled water and is now battling it out with Coca-Cola at the Olympic games.
As one of the Olympics biggest official sponsors, Coca-Cola, who claims their bottled water “doesn’t compete with tap water,” is of course throwing a huge tantrum over this reality: they are now going to have to compete with tap water. You know, the same tap water that they use to fill their Dasani bottles. Maybe Coca-Cola should just stick with making Coke instead of re-packaging tap water from the local bottling plant in Vancouver and trucking it in to the Olympics.
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January 28th, 2010
The bottled water industry tries very hard to convince consumers that buying their product is fine, because all those empty bottles are recyclable. What they don’t address is exactly what plastic bottle recycling often entails.
Check out this video from National Geographic for a closer look at the process plastic bottles go through in order to produce polyester clothing in China.
As the video shows us, plastic bottles are collected in various locations, like here in the US, or over in Europe. Then, the plastic bottles are shredded up, packaged in cellophane, boxed up into giant presents of plastic goodness (a valuable commodity, of course) and sent on a 7,000-mile trip to China. The plastic then goes through an unimaginably complex process involving boiling, rotating, drying, melting, spinning, bonding, tearing, packaging, scraping, threading, weaving, looping, and brushing until the polyester textile is made. But never fear, the stylists are very economical while cutting out the templates prior to the polyester being sewn–they wont create anymore waste than necessary. Phew! Read more…
