March 22 – 26 is World Water Week: Watch Tapped and Take Action
Posted March 22, 2010 in Curbing Pollution
March 22nd is World Water Day and marks the launch of Tapped, a movie and an online campaign to educate and inspire action on the problems with water privatization and the bottled water industry.
With a five day campaign and a thirty day tour of the U.S., the Tapped team connects the dots between the many interrelated problems of privatization of water resources and the proliferation of bottled water:
- Lack of access to clean water is a very serious problem that affects people around the world, including 10% of Americans. According to the United Nations, “By the year 2030, two-thirds of the world will lack access to clean drinking water.” Typically it is the poorest communities, those least able to afford bottled water, that are forced to spend their scarce income to purchase water for drinking, cooking and bathing. Learn more about the problem of water justice from the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.
- Bottled water is a major source of marine plastic pollution, which plagues our global oceans. Plastic waste makes up 60-80% of marine debris (the term used to describe pervasive pollution in the ocean). This plastic never degrades, but breaks into tiny pieces that are ingested by turtles, birds, and other marine mammals.
- Bottled water is a very lucrative industry and privatization of water often results in major conflict. When private companies extract water from municipal sources, they are profiting from a public resource. In the U.S. and around the world, disputes about access to water and privatization of this precious resource have torn communities apart and have lead to armed conflict.
- The U.S. municipal water and sewage infrastructure is falling into severe disrepair, and buying bottled water exacerbates this problem. When we purchase water, we give money to large, private corporations rather than calling on our government to maintain good infrastructure to provide citizens with reliable access to clean water. The film looks at examples of Cities such as Atlanta that were convinced to enter into private water supply contracts with terrible results.
- Finally, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and many other chemicals are appearing in our water supplies. Rather than buying bottled water, which is rarely tested, we need to focus on protecting our water supplies and reducing the chemicals from agricultural and sewage.
The good news is that you as an individual can make simple lifestyle changes that will help solve these problems. Here are some ways you can Take Action:
- Carry a steel reusable water container rather than buying bottled water.
- Tell your municipal, state, and federal leaders that you want safe water municipal water supplies and solid infrastructure.
- Reduce your bottled water use! Take the pledge to only use bottled water when absolutely necessary.
- Or, become a fan of Get Off the Bottle on Facebook.
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Comments
Samantha Smith — Mar 23 2010 01:28 AM
These are very surprising data. I just can't imagine what will happen in 2030, everyone should definitely get involved by taking the actions posted above.
Dr. James Singmaster — Mar 23 2010 10:20 AM
I have sent e-mail to you outlining how to make organic wastes into a resource by using pyrolysis on them to destroy germs, toxics and drugs. Belaboring water pollution does not get viable action going to stop having drugs showing up in drinking water that now has EPA put limits on several drugs. We need to stop the pollution at the source and that can be achieved with pyrolysis of collected organic wastes and sewage solids. In United Kingdom, its DEFRA agency has section working on waste strategy, and I would suggest that NRDC ought to call for our government to set up such an office before more serious water pollution events happen due to mishandling of those waste messes. Dr. J. Singmaster
bob loblaw — Mar 27 2010 08:25 PM
Plastics and the oceans are bad enough, but bullshit and the oceans is more sinister. Get your facts straight. In research reported at the ACS's August 2009 National Meeting, Saido and colleagues first busted the myth of the everlasting quality of plastics. They revealed that light, white-foamed plastic decomposed rapidly at temperatures commonly found in the oceans.
In the new report at this years ACS mmeting, Saido's group now has added hard plastics and hard epoxy resins -- to the plastics that decompose under conditions commonly found in the oceans.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100323184607.htm
Leila Monroe — Apr 8 2010 07:21 PM
Bob: Dr. Saido and his colleagues presented this information at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. We contacted Dr. Saido to learn whether this study has been published or peer reviewed, but he told us that it has not. Their experiments on the breakdown of hard plastics was researched in the laboratory -- not in the sea -- so it's not clear what can be extrapolated from the work.
It is generally believed that most polymers are persistent in the marine environment. For example Barnes et al. (2009) state "Most polymers are highly persistent in the environment and only degrade slowly via photo-catalysis when exposed to UV radiation (Andrady 2003). Estimates of the longevity of plastics are variable but are believed to be in the range of hundreds or even thousands of years depending on the physicals and chemical properties of the polymer..." There are examples that illustrate that the lifespan of a plastic object in the sea can be many decades, such as a piece of plastic in the stomach of an albatross that was part of a plane shot down 60 years prior 9600 km away.
Plastic compounds do deteriorate from UV degradation when exposed to sunlight, but the saline (salty) environment of the sea and the cooling effect of ocean water temperature slows this deterioration. Furthermore, a very large proportion of the plastic debris that enters the ocean is believed to sink to the sea floor (it is estimated that only 1/2 of the plastics float). The longevity of plastic on the seafloor -- an environment that is void of sunlight, extremely cold (2 degrees C), and low in oxygen -- is unknown but believed to be potentially on the order of centuries.
While Saido's research seems to suggest that some classes of plastics degrade at surface ocean conditions, in essence we already knew some degradation occurred because there are broken little bits of plastic floating in oceans around the world.