If your dog liked chlorine he’d buy a swimming pool…
Chlorine is a nasty but cheap chemical used to make safe drinking water. Even the smallest water supplies are now usually chlorinated.
Chlorine is a respiratory irritant. Its gas irritates mucus membranes and its liquid will burn skin. In concentrated doses it is fatal. In fact it was used as a war gas in 1915.
While its main purpose in drinking water is to kill bacteria, it doesn’t know the difference between good and bad bacteria. When chlorinated water is ingested it kills the “good bacteria” that exists in our bodies (and our pets bodies) that is essential for good health.
Be kind to your pets….Don’t give them chlorinated water.
Is Your Water Cooler Making You sick?
For years, employers have worried that time and productivity were being lost to ever popular “water cooler gatherings”. ….Now employers have another worry on their hands: Is the water being dispensed from the company’s water machines making their employee’s sick?
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the bottled water machines, using those large blue bottles, or the more environmentally friendly “filtered” water dispensers…Either way; tests are showing that the water being dispensed from virtually all water appliances (with one notable exception) in offices and businesses contains bacteria levels resembling the water in a fish tank ….
The bacteria problem with the drinking water is being caused by the “reservoirs”….that’s the fancy word for the plastic or stainless steel bucket hidden in the center of all water machines…. Your drinking water sits in this bucket being chilled while waiting for you to dispense it into your cup….since the water contains no chlorine; it has no protection from bacteria…. You’re supposed to clean these “buckets” on a regular basis using a chlorine bleach and water solution to keep them sterile, otherwise the non-chlorinated water sitting in them begins to “grow things”….
BTU International in Billerica MA started looking into alternative water providers that offered filtered units simply with the hopes of getting away from all the hassles associated with the storing, lugging, and lifting of those blue, 42 pound, five gallon water bottles used by their current provider….. During their search, they decided that part of their due diligence should be to investigate and test water purity, both with their current provider and with all new bidders for the contract.
The results of the tests were both surprising and frightening. In the tests conducted by Vitale and Hopcroft, the first sample tested was plain old Billerica tap water…the result: no bacteria (chlorinated). The second test was their current provider; “Poland Spring”….The result: The water tested directly from the bottle: No bacteria…. The same water coming from the dispenser: A bacteria count of over 13,000!
The last two tests were for the two companies vying for the BTU contract: Stonybrook Water and New England Portable Water…. Both were using “filtered” machines and both had their test units in place for about a month…. The results – Stonybrook Water: No Bacteria….New England Portable: 4100.
Conclusions:
1. Since “Poland Springs” had zero bacteria when the sample was drawn directly from the bottle and a 13,000 count when it was taken from the cooler; the contamination is occurring in the cooler’s reservoir where the un-chlorinated water is sitting stagnant.
2. Since the “New England Portable” cooler was using Billerica tap water to supply its filtered appliance, and since the Billerica tap water had zero bacteria, it’s bacteria count of 4100 had to be occurring in the reservoir as well since the machine’s filters were removing the chlorine from the town’s water.
3. The reason New England Portable’s bacteria count was only 4,100 vs. Poland Spring’s 13,000 was that the cooler was only a month old….given a few more months for growth to occur, it would have been equal to Poland Spring.
4. Since the Stonybrook appliance utilizes “Dry Technology”…..meaning it has no reservoir…The Billerica tap water was going from chlorinated to un-chlorinated and ultra-filtered and into the cup in a half a second…. Consequently; no bacteria….Hence the slogan: “Fresh Squeezed Water”
Bottled Water – Pure Drink or Pure Hype? New NRDC report
PRINCIPAL FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Americans increasingly are turning to bottled water, making it a $4 billion-a-year business in the United States. [1] Millions of us are willing to pay 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than we do for tap water — though we probably rarely think of it that way. [2] However, some bottled water contains bacterial contaminants, and several brands of bottled water contain synthetic organic chemicals (such as industrial solvents, chemicals from plastic, or trihalomethanes — the by-products of the chemical reaction between chlorine and organic matter in water) or inorganic contaminants (such as arsenic, a known carcinogen) in at least some bottles (see Chapter 3 and our accompanying Technical Report [print report only]).[1a] Moreover, as Chapter 4 documents, bottled water regulations have gaping holes, and both state and federal bottled water regulatory programs are severely underfunded. In Chapter 5 we present evidence that there is substantially misleading marketing of some bottled water, and in Chapter 6 we argue that consumers should be informed about the contaminants found in the water they purchase. NRDC’s major findings and recommendations are summarized below.
Findings:
Most bottled water apparently is of good quality, but some contains contamination; it should not automatically be assumed to be purer or safer than most tap water.
Based on available data and our testing, most bottled water is of good quality, and contamination posing immediate risks to healthy people is rare. However, blanket reassurances from the bottled water industry that bottled water is totally safe and pure are false.
No one should assume that just because water comes from a bottle that it is necessarily any purer or safer than most tap water. Testing commissioned by NRDC and studies by previous investigators show that bottled water is sometimes contaminated. NRDC contracted with three leading independent laboratories to do “snapshot” testing (testing one to three times for a subset of contaminants of concern) of bottled water.
We found after testing more than 1,000 bottles that about one fourth of the bottled water brands (23 of 103 waters, or 22 percent) were contaminated at levels violating strict enforceable state (California) limits for the state in which they were purchased.
The Global Water Crisis
As Americans freely pay up to five dollars a bottle for designer water from exotic islands, there is a crisis occurring on a large part of our planet that eclipses even the energy crisis…. Consider the following:
The Global Water Crisis
3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease. (11)
43% of water-related deaths are due to diarrhea. (11)
84% of water-related deaths are in children ages 0 - 14. (11)
98% of water-related deaths occur in the developing world. (11)
884 million people, lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people. (5)
The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. (1)
At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease. (1)
Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. (12)
An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the typical person living in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.(1)
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| World Water Coverage. View larger map. |
About a third of people without access to an improved water source live on less than $1 a day. More than two thirds of people without an improved water source live on less than $2 a day. (1)
Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city. (1)
Without food a person can live for weeks, but without water you can expect to live only a few days.(4)
The daily requirement for sanitation, bathing, and cooking needs, as well as for assuring survival, is about 13.2 gallons per person.(3)
Water projects in developing countries fail at an average rate of 50% or higher.