Think Plastic Bottles Are Toxic? Try Canned Food
Here at disinformation we long ago dispensed with plastic water bottles in the wake of our film Tapped, but now it seems that canned foods are way more dangerous in terms of their delivery of BPAs into our bodies. Via CBS News:
Talk about stirring up controversy. A new study shows that the urine of people who consume canned soup can contain surprisingly high levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a hormone-disrupting compound linked to health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
People who consumed one serving of canned soup a day for five days had a more than 1,000 percent increase in urinary BPA over people who consumed fresh soup for five days, the study showed.
“We’ve known for a while that drinking beverages that have been stored in certain hard plastics can increase…
Did Coca-Cola Trash The Grand Canyon’s Plastic Bottle Ban?
It’s good to see the mainstream media calling foul on some corporate dirty work. Karin Kline writes in the LA Times:
Grand Canyon National Park was just about to impose a ban on single-use plastic water bottles — the most common form of trash found along its trails — when the plan was suddenly put on hold, the New York Times reported. The paper raises the possibility that Coca-Cola Co. was able to get a sympathetic ear at the National Parks Foundation because the company, which bottles Dasani water, is a major donor.
This isn’t a radical new idea. Zion National Park already has a ban. The park provides “hydration stations” for people to refill their reusable bottles, as the Grand Canyon park would have.
The story included a strange comment from a Coca-Cola spokeswoman, who said that bans on single-use plastic bottles are never the answer, and that recycling would resolve the…
The World Of Water Filtration
The Big Berkey
About a year ago we met filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, director of the documentary Tapped, which outlined the ills of bottled water so effectively that we quickly decided to forgo those five-gallon jugs of water in favor of tap water at the disinformation offices, and I did the same at home.
However, while New York City’s tap water isn’t bad compared to some municipalities, it still contains plenty of chemicals that I have no intention of knowingly ingesting (fluoride, chlorine, various VOCs, etc.), so we decided to install water filters.
At the office we installed a plumbed-in filtered water dispenser from local company Cure Water Systems, and it works well in an office environment, proudly sporting one of Stephanie’s “Get Off The Bottle” stickers.
At home I installed an under-sink filter from Aquasana on the advice of super-informed science writer Terri Mitchell, who contributed a great article to the disinformation anthology You Are Still Being…
What’s In Your State’s Water Supply?
Russell McLendon’s investigation for Mother Nature Network reveals just which toxins are in your state’s drinking water:
…The U.S. government had virtually no oversight of drinking-water quality before the 1970s, leaving the job to a patchwork of local laws that were often weakly enforced and widely ignored…
Erin Brockovich Where Are You? Hexavalent Chromium Found In 31 American Cities
Animation by Chris 73 (CC)
This is the best advertisement for reverse-osmosis walter filters that I’ve seen yet. Mind you, the intentionally-added fluoride in many public water systems is just as bad — although interested parties would have you believe otherwise. Don’t think that bottled water is the answer, either — many bottled waters contain chemicals too because 40% of bottled water is drawn from municipal supplies. From the Washington Post:
A new analysis showing the presence of a probable carcinogen in the tap water of 31 cities across the country, including the District and Bethesda, has raised questions about what consumers in those communities can do to reduce their exposure.
The chemical, hexavalent chromium, got public attention via the 2000 film “Erin Brockovich” and has been deemed a “probable carcinogen” by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Although basic water filters such as those made by Brita and PUR do…
Want To Lose Weight? Simple – Drink Water!
Photo: Matthew Bowden (www.digitallyrefreshing.com)
Can it really be this easy? It certainly won’t cost much to try it out (just don’t use bottled water!). From Business Week:
Close the diet books and skip the pills. The latest weight-loss trick may be as simple as gulping a couple of glasses of water before you eat.
A new study found that middle-aged and older adults who drank two cups of water before each meal consumed fewer calories and lost more weight than those who skipped drinking water.
Researchers divided two groups of overweight and obese men and women aged 55 to 75 into two groups: one group was told to follow a low-fat, low-calorie diet; the other group was told to follow the same diet and to drink two cups of water before breakfast, lunch and dinner.
After 12 weeks, those who drank water before meals had lost 15.5 pounds, compared to 11 pounds for the non-water…
I’m Done With Celebrity Endorsements
Stephanie Soechtig, director of the disinformation documentary Tapped, writing at Huffington Post:
At the risk of career suicide I’m calling bullshit on the hypocrisy of Hollywood and its celebrity endorsements. From Reese Witherspoon endorsing Avon — a company that loads its products with phthalates and parabens (chemicals linked to breast cancer) — to Jennifer Aniston, a woman who says she cares about conserving water resources and then endorses bottled water.
You can’t turn around these days without seeing a Hollywood A-lister endorsing a product. Here’s my problem with the whole situation: often they are endorsing products that aren’t good for us and aren’t good for the environment.
Seriously people, WTF? Am I the only one who saw Spider-Man? You know, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility?”
Take Reese Witherspoon and her colleagues Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymoore, Jessica Biel, et al — all these women endorse various brands of cosmetics that contain…
The Fluoride Fraud
By Abby Martin for Mediaroots.org:
When was the last time you stopped to think about the one thing you can’t live without? I don’t mean the Internet – I’m talking about water. Without clean drinking water, life could not go on. This is why it’s so important that we know what is in our water. For the past sixty-five years, city governments nationwide have been adding a controversial substance called fluoride to municipal water supplies.
You probably recognize the word fluoride from the back of your toothpaste tube or from your visits to the dentist. But the fluoride added to our water is not the same as that in our toothpaste. The chemical added to our water is a fluorine compound called hexafluorosilicic acid that is generated as a by-product from the phosphate fertilizer industry.
Phosphates are minerals that are used to make fertilizer, and phosphate mining industry is a giant moneymaker. Fluoride is created by the production of fertilizer as…
Katie Couric Gets ‘Tapped’ – The Bottled Water Debate
Is bottled water bad for the environment? Katie Couric talks to Stephanie Soechtig, director of the disinformation documentary Tapped, and Joe Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association.
Tracking The ‘Evolution’ Of Nanoparticles As They Decontaminate Groundwater
Kurt Pfitzer reports that engineers are usimg advanced imaging techniques to examine bimetallic materials that have remediated more than 50 toxic waste sites, for PhysOrg.com:
Iron nanoparticles 1,000 times thinner than a human hair have demonstrated an unprecedented ability to clean contaminated groundwater since they were invented 10 years ago at Lehigh.
The palladium-coated particles have remediated more than 50 toxic waste sites in the U.S. and other countries in one-tenth the time, and at a much greater economy of scale, than traditional “pump and treat” methods.
Now, thanks to Lehigh’s unrivaled electron microscopy and spectroscopy facilities, researchers have gained unmatched insights that could improve the efficiency and extend the applications
of the powerful nanoparticles.The researchers used scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS) to capture, for the first time, the evolution in the nanostructure of the bimetallic particles as they remove contaminants in water.
The advanced imaging instruments at Lehigh…
Irish Minister’s Fluoride Hypocrisy: ‘Fluoridated Water Causes Cancer in Children!’ But You’re Going to Pay for it Anyway!
Neil Foster stirs up the fluoride-in-water health controversy, in Ireland’s Sovereign Independent:
In the video below, John Gormley, 3 years prior to becoming the [Irish] Minister of the Environment clearly stated on RTE’s ‘Primetime’ program that fluoridated water was dangerous for babies and indeed elaborated on this by informing the public, quite rightly, that it caused bone cancer in children. He now expects us to pay, through the use of water meters, for the very same fluoridated toxic water which he openly admits is detrimental to human health.
Despite the clear evidence that this is indeed the case and the statement by Gormley back in 2003 that there was no need for fluoride in the public water supply, it is still there…
Nestlé Steps Up The Bottled Water Battle
Deborah Ball looks at the Swiss bottled water giant Nestlé and its fight against those who prefer their water delivered in more responsible ways, in the Wall Street Journal:
CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon—In this idyllic town on the north slope of Mount Hood, an autopsy on three dead rainbow trout may play a role in Nestlé SA’s efforts to reverse a deep slide in its bottled-water business.
Bottled water, which for years delivered double-digit growth for Nestlé, is under fire from environmentalists. They decry the energy used to transport it and the use of billions of plastic bottles, and oppose efforts to use new springs, citing concerns about water scarcity.
In Cascade Locks, Nestlé is trying to tap 100 million gallons of water annually for its Arrowhead water brand from a new spring—and keep the environmentalists happy, too. A key is proving that water drawn from the spring—which supplies a hatchery that raises Idaho Sockeye,…
Finally A Plastic That We Can Feel Good About
If this becomes real, maybe we can stop feeling so guilty about all those plastic water bottles. That’s a big ‘if,’ though, so get off the bottle for now… Story from Popular Mechanics:
By year’s end, an Indiana company says it will be making plastic from algae, substituting up to half of the material normally derived from fossil fuels with biomass from the aquatic plants, and selling the product to manufacturers.
As the bioplastics industry surges, a search for alternative feedstocks led Cereplast CEO Frederic Scheer and his colleagues to algae, which he says is close enough to the starches the company already turns into plastics—like corn, wheat and tapioca—to go commercial after just 18 months of R&D. There’s just one hitch: getting enough of the green stuff to make it in quantity. Given a big enough source of algae, Scheer says, “we could have introduced this product probably last year.”
Algae has long…
American Town Bans Bottled Water
Photo: Ten Thousand Bullets (CC)
Is this the beginning of the end for plastic bottles of water? Is there hope that the Great Pacific (and Atlantic) Garbage Patch might stop growing? Here at disinformation we’re sensitized to the issues as we’ll soon be releasing the movie Tapped on DVD, but could this ban be going to far, too soon? Report from The Boston Channel:
The town of Concord has banned the sale of bottled drinking water in town beginning in 2011. “We only have one planet and I just don’t want to see it spoiled,” said Jean Hill, who introduced the measure at Concord’s Town Meeting.
Hill said that New York, Illinois and Virginia, as well as more than 100 cities, have taken action to cut spending on bottled water.
The measured passed by Concord would allow the sale of refillable containers of water, which could still be sold and delivered in town. Only plastic bottles that…
When Water Bottles Kill
Last week I posted a story about Tapped filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig’s Get Off The Bottle tour. Stephanie and co-producer Sarah Olson came by the disinformation NYC offices and I asked her about her appearance on Fox Business Network’s John Stossel show the night before. I feared the worst after reading Stossel’s blog post in which he wrote: “On my FBN show, tonight at 8pm ET, I’ll confront director Stephanie Soechtig about the myths she’s pushing.”
Here’s the confrontation – who do you think comes out on top? My vote’s with Stephanie, although she didn’t have a chance to add information about some of the other problems of bottled water, such as the massive plastic garbage patches now floating in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Millions Drink Toxic Water In The USA, But It’s EPA-Approved!
Photo: Matthew Bowden (www.digitallyrefreshing.com)
From Natural News:
It has been so long since the federal law regulating tap water has been updated that since 2004, more than one-fifth of the U.S. population has consumed tap water that the government classifies as toxic, but still approves for human consumption.
“People don’t understand that just because water is technically legal, it can still present health risks,” said Pankaj Parekh, director of water quality for the City of Los Angeles.
Even though more than 60,000 chemicals are used in the United States each year and most have never been tested for human safety, the Safe Water Drinking Act regulates only 91 different toxins. Many of these are regulations have not been updated since the 1980s or even since the law was first passed in 1974. The law does not take into account newer findings that certain chemicals can be more toxic in combination than separately. To top it…
Get Off The Bottle
Here at the disinformation NYC offices we recently ditched our 5-Gallon water jugs and fitted a water filter cooler (tastes just as good, no more storage of those jugs – and it’s cheaper!). We were educated about the ills of the plastic bottles by filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, whose movie Tapped we’ll be releasing on DVD this summer. Stephanie is here in New York for Earth Day and appeared on CBS Early Show this morning (video below). If you’re in New York, don’t miss an exclusive screening of Tapped at the Sunshine Theater this evening, preceded by a bottle exchange sponsored by Whole Foods, where the first 100 guests to bring an empty plastic water bottle to the event will receive cool Kleen Kanteen bottles in exchange and after that, people will receive coupons for 40% off Klean Kanteen stainless steel bottles (outside the theater at 6 PM).
