Today is World Water Day.

I know many of us have talked about bottled water, & I know I’ve said to some of you (on occasion) to please STOP buying bottled water.

Esp. since clean water has come more to light, w/ the recent earthquakes in Haiti & Chile. Clean water is a commodity, it’s not something that’s even available here in the US. While we don’t really see it, 10% of the US don’t have access to clean water like we do.

Most of us, however, do have clean water readily available to us.

But even if you don’t, please stop buying cases of bottled water. It irks me to no end when I see ppl at the groc store going out w/ cases & cases of it in their carts.

Forget the waste it creates. Obvs, that’s not an issue to these ppl.

Think about that it’s just NOT good for you to drink it.

First of all, it’s not really regulated like it should be. The FDA only has 1 person on staff to make sure that bottled water is safe. Why? Well, from the FDA’s website:

“FDA monitors and inspects bottled water products and processing plants under its general food safety program, not a specific bottled water program. Because FDA’s experience over the years has shown that bottled water has a good safety record, bottled water plants generally are assigned low priority for inspection.”

But mostly, b/c we know that these plastics are made w/ a chemical called Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET or PETE). There was a study done at Goethe University in Frankfurt. They found that water was more often contaminated when PET plastic bottles than in glass bottles. They believed that oestrogens leached from the plastic into the water.

I found this on the Environmental Working Group’s website:

“Toxic disinfection byproducts (DBPs) such as chloroform, bromodichloromethane, and haloacetic acids, are formed when disinfectants (chlorine, ozone, chlorine dioxide or chloramine) react with organic matter, urban and agricultural contaminants, bromine, and iodide during the treatment of drinking water (EPA 2008a). While only eleven DBPs are currently regulated in the U.S., up to 600 different chemicals may form as byproducts of disinfection (Richardson 1998, 1999a,b, 2003), including 74 DBPs that are not regulated but that may be associated with either DNA damage or carcinogenicity (Richardson 2007).”

They also listed as contaminants in bottled water:
– chloroform – FDA regulates that you must have less than 80 ppb of trihalomethanes (THMs), i.e. chloroform, bromoform, bromodichloromethane, and chlorodibromomethane. The 80 ppb limit was actually reached as a compromise between public health & treatment costs. “Chloroform is listed as a carcinogen in the California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (also known as Proposition 65), with safety standards for oral ingestion at 10 ppb (OEHHA 2008).

– Haloacetic acids – “Haloacetic acids are genotoxic and carcinogenic; they can also produce significant metabolic disturbances (Robertson 2007).”

– Nitrate – “According to EPA, infants below the age of six months who drink water containing nitrate in excess of the drinking water standard could become seriously ill and, if untreated, may die (EPA 2001b).”

– Ammonia – “Ammonia triggers asthma attacks in some people and at high levels of exposure it is linked to a broader range of health problems (Makarovsky 2008). According to a 2004 government review: “We do not know if exposure to ammonia causes birth defects, or if it can pass to the fetus across the placenta or to infants via breast milk” (ATSDR 2004).”

– Drugs – Acetaminophen & Caffeine

You can read through the article for details on the pollutants above, plus more found. (Arsenic, Radioactivity, Boron are among the ones that stood out to me).

Then, you have the water cooler jugs at offices. The plastic water jugs for the water cooler is made from Bisphenol A (you’ve all heard of BPA, originally developed as a synthetic estrogen). You can easily search the gov’t.’s archive of public medical journal articles & find all sorts of issues w/ BPA.

From one article:

“We are confident that adult exposure to BPA affects the male reproductive tract, and that long-lasting, organizational effects in response to developmental exposure to BPA occur in the brain, the male reproductive system, and metabolic processes. We consider it likely, but requiring further confirmation, that adult exposure to BPA affects the brain, the female reproductive system, and the immune system, and that developmental effects occur in the female reproductive system.”

Just read through a handful of the articles. Links to breast or prostate cancer, reproductive failures. There’s heart disease, diabetes, obesity, & asthma. If that’s not enough, you also have the cognitive and behavioral problems linked to exposure to BPAs.

There was a study a couple years back that said that 93% of Americans had BPA in their urine, & stayed in the body much longer than originally thought.

Anyway, please stop using the water bottles. Or, at least only when necessary, & recycle it after ONE use; don’t attempt to re-use it.

If you want to read more, Steph had once written a post about bottled water, you can read it here. Or, you can read more about the 7 different types of plastics that she had posted about here.