Contaminants · Eco-Chick

Browsing all posts tagged with contaminants

Is Your Drinking Water Safe? That Depends….

Article 31: Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.

In 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations created and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 30 articles defined THE inalienable rights for all people and all nations. Today, there is a call to add one more article to the declaration. “Recognizing that over a billion people across the planet lack access to clean and potable water and that millions die each year as a result, it is imperative to add one more article to this historic declaration, the Right to Water.”

If you’ve been reading my writings you know that I tend to focus on food issues. But for a moment I wanted to focus on water. Water is life. This is the first of at least two posts that will deal with water issues. This blog will look at the issue of clean water in America. Clean water in America? Really? Isn’t all the water that flows through our pipes and into our homes safe?

If you are like me, water is probably something you tend to take for granted. You take showers, you wash your clothes, you reach for the tap in your sink and you’re pretty confident that clean, potable water will be there for you. But for billions of people across the world water; finding it, transporting it, and making sure it’s clean, is the single most important part of their lives.

Even here in the United States, clean drinking water is a very important issue, and one that most people are not aware of. A recent study conducted at the Southern Nevada Water Authority (as reported New Scientist on January 11) surveyed drinking water for more than 28 million Americans. The survey screened water from 19 US water utilities for 51 different compounds. The analysis revealed widespread low level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals including beta blockers, herbicides banned in Europe, mood stabilizing drugs, estrogen hormones, painkillers, tranquilizers, antibiotics, anticonvulsants, anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-cholesterol drugs and many more.

No need to go to the doctor; just drink lots of water to get your daily does of FDA prescribed drugs! All jokes aside, the amounts of these contaminants in our water is a million times less than medical doses, but no one knows what the cumulative effect of drinking this contaminated water is.

After reading this survey I decided to contact my local water company to find out the real story of MY water. What I learned was that our water is very safe for what is tested for. But my water company just like every other one in the US does not test for antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals. It turns out that in the U.S., all water utilities follow only what is required by the Safe Water Drinking Act (remember that President Bush raised the limits on the amount of arsenic allowed in our drinking water, so I’d question the Federally approved levels of anything.)

I am not a doctor or scientist but you have to think that drinking water with any levels of pharmaceuticals has got to be bad for our health.

This is not new information to the EPA. There is an entire section on the EPA’s website covering Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) as pollutants which they refers to as “any product used by individuals for personal health or cosmetic reasons or used by agribusiness to enhance growth or health of livestock.”

According to the EPA: “More research is needed to determine the extent of ecological harm and any role it may have in potential human health effects. To date, scientists have found no evidence of adverse human health effects from PPCPs in the environment.” But rather then filtering it out, we will basically be human guinea pigs, drinking the contaminants until we (like the gender-switching fish) have genetic mutations.

So what can you do to make sure that water in your home is safe?

Well you could put in a water filtration system like a reverse osmosis system. If you are not comfortable with government set levels that this is may be the way to go. However, be forewarned, wastewater is a by-product of the reverse osmosis process. Better systems will make almost 4 gallons of water brine for every one-gallon purified, while lower grade systems can waste as much as 8 gallons of water per gallon purified.

Radiant Life Company sells a 14 stage Biocompatible Water system that filters everything, including pharmaceutical residues. The system will run you $1,595 plus shipping and then you need a plumber to install. It includes a reverse osmosis system as one of the stages so I would assume the wastewater by-product would increase with each additional stage.

Or you could just by a carbon filter like Brita to be on the safe side and drink the water from the tap.

It is all up to personal choice and preference weighing the health and environmental effects — wasting water or not contaminating your body. I wish it was not one or the other.

But what we really should do is force the EPA to make sure our water is free and clear of all contaminants. We need to create petition to amend the Safe Water Drinking Act to require all water utilities to test and filter our drinking for pharmaceuticals.

Anyone want to help me?

Follow me on Twitter @Green_Luvin

contaminants, drinking water, epa, Safe Water Drinking Act

Ewwww…..This is Why You Need a Water Filter!

3 Comments

by Starre Vartan · 07/23/07

On the left is the filter that was replaced, on the right is the new filter.

Bottled water sucks, we all know that (if you don’t know why, read this article and you’ll know everything): Here are my top 5 reasons for eschewing the bottle….

–It wastes fossil fuels during transportation (especially when it comes from ridiculous locales like Fiji!)

–Bottled water isn’t any cleaner and may actually have all sorts of bad stuff in it because bottled water isn’t regulated by any outside testing agency, whereas all municipal water is tested every day for contaminants and chemicals.

–All those plastic bottles leach toxins into the water (especially if left in the sun or subject to temperature fluctuations)

–Only about 20% of all plastic bottles are recycled; that goes for water receptacles too

–It’s a scam; why spend money on something that should be free? When you do, you’re only supporting the privatization of our natural resources, which should be available to all. Just because you can afford bottled water doesn’t mean that everyone can. By expecting, as citizens, to have access to clean water, we force our government to invest in and maintain water supplies.

At the same time, I know, I know, our municipal water isn’t as good as it could be (some areas have great water, some not so much). I live in a very populous area next to Long Island Sound, so our water is pretty low-quality and it’s chlorinated, which is not something I want to be drinking tons of or showering in. Instead of spending hundreds a year and contributing to massive amounts of plastic waste, I bought a this whole-house water filtration system from Gaiam. They have other types here. I bought a whole- house filter because I wanted to make sure I was showering and watering my garden with non-chemicalized water too.

Also, I carry my cool Sigg water bottle with me wherever I go, and fill up in bathrooms and water fountains when I’m on the go. Even though that water isn’t filtered, most of my agua is, so I think it’s worth reducing waste and energy use to subject myself to unfiltered water a small percentage of the time.

Make sure you dispose of your filters properly, though! They don’t belong in the regular garbage as they are now mini toxic-waste holders. By shipping them off to the landfill you’re taking all the now concentrated wastes you’ve removed with the filter and adding them right back into the environment. Drop those old filters off at your municipal toxic waste collection area.

bath, bottled water, car, contaminants, Energy, farm, filter, garbage, garden, local, Long Island, magazine, plastic, plastic bottles, recycle, recycled, resources, sigg, sport, Tea, Toxins, transportation, waste, water, Water Bottle

Health Care Without Harm

8 Comments

by Kimberly Jordan Allen · 04/16/06

I remember growing up along Long Island Sound and enjoying its beaches as a child. In the late eighties, when tons of medical waste ended up in the NY rivers and the sound, the beaches became hazardous, or what was perhaps even more disgusting, bio-hazardous. My friends and I heard awful stories of syringes and other medical waste littering the shore. I recently had to undergo a surgical procedure and wondered what was going to happen to the wrappers, tubes, and those hideous little rubber padded socks that all procedure rooms seem to require. Were those awful socks going to end up on some beach next to some poor unsuspecting kid’s sandcastle in Greenwich one day?

Health Care Without Harm is a global coalition of medical practitioners, hospitals, community groups, labor unions, and environmental health affiliates whose constituents include 443 organizations in 52 countries. The purpose of the coalition is to minimize pollution and thereby protect the health of practitioners, their patients and the surrounding environment, a.k.a. the earth.

In 1995 the EPA identified medical waste incinerators as the leading source of dioxin contamination in the environment. This report brought health care workers together to found the organization in 1996. Today, HCWH touts such successes as: eliminating mercury-based equipment completely in the US, promoting safe waste management and helping to close incinerators worldwide, initiating green building programs geared specifically toward hospitals, and helping to improve the food hospitals serve in order to support local agriculture and provide patients with nutritionally viable meals.

The HCWH has come under fire from conservatives who feel the organization is a front for the anti-capitalistic environmental movement that thwarts progress on any level. Perhaps right wingers are just fearing the loss of their extra special golf cart at the club, or their financial panderings from BigBiz. The religious right fear the organization’s manipulation of clergy for their detrimental eco-slander that supposedly does more harm than good by promoting less toxic practices. HCWH stays strong and continues to fight for the removal of PVCs and other dangerous materials and contaminants in medical systems. And then there are religious groups affiliated with the coalition who steer clear of the partisan politics.

Just as the Hippocratic Oath promises to, “first, do no harm,” HCWH is based on the premise that health care providers have a responsibility to eliminate practices that harm people and the environment. Together with our partners around the world, we share a vision of a health care industry that first does no harm, and instead promotes the health of people and the environment. To that end, we are working to implement ecologically sound and healthy alternatives to health care practices that pollute and contribute to disease.

I love good news. To find out what you can do to participate in this movement click here.

agriculture, car, coal, community, contaminants, Dioxin, Eco-Chick, epa, Food, health, health care, labor, local, Long Island, News, Politics, Pollution, spa, Tea, waste

Farmed and Dangerous

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by Starre Vartan · 11/21/05

So we all know that eating fish is a good way to get Omega 3′s, but because we’re all so hungry for the slippery suckers, wild-caught fish is expensive. But hell, we can farm corn and wheat, why not farm fish? Problem solved. Turns out that farming fish causes as many problems, if not more, than catching them from the ocean.

According to luluzine: Vol 2.6:

“The high PCB content these fish contain, not to mention their ubiquitous sea
lice problem, flow over into wild salmon runs and are responsible for 90-97%
of the collapse of these runs, according to marine researcher Alexandra
Morton. Add to that the fact that these fish find all kinds of escape
routes, (there are over a million reported to have gone missing last year,
and it’s suspected that number is actually much higher), and you’ve got
runaway Atlantic salmon breeding in open water, competing with indigenous
fish and consequentially spreading disease.”
According to a 2004 study called, “A Global Assessment of Organic
Contaminants in Farmed vs. Wild Salmon: Geographical Differences and Health
Risks,” (reported to be the most thorough study on the subject done to
date), consuming farmed salmon more than once a month could increase your
risk of getting cancer by, “an unacceptable amount.”