Bird Fancier's Journal, 24 August 2011

Another thing could be a filter...just as a suggestion. My water from tap tastes terrible but I have a Brita pitcher I keep in my fridge and it helps tons. 

Thanks missychick21! I have a brita...it does not work for removing some of the hard minerals that taste yucky. There are people here that actually sell there houses because the water is so bad! Taste bad and ruins cars, showers, pipes...even if you have a water softener! 

Ewwww that's terrible :( I wish you could find some way to eliminate them completely but at least you have found a way to help some. Good luck :)  

I'm curious as to why u don't want to drink out of plastic bottles? 

There are all kinds of yummy zero caffiene teas out there! You could get all your water intake and enjoy the wonderful advantages of tea. 

I don't want to pay for bottle water and I don't need any more chemicals than I already have: American tap water is among the safest in the world. As much as 40% of the bottled water sold in the U.S. is just filtered tap water anyway. Be sure to check the label and look for “from a municipal source” or “community water system”, which just means it is tap water. By drinking tap water, you can avoid the fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, and other chemicals that studies have found in bottled water. Tap water costs about $0.002 per gallon compared to the $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon charge for bottled water. If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. 88% of empty plastic water bottles in the United States are not recycled. The Container Recycling Institute says that plastic water bottles are disposed of (not recycled) at the rate of 30 million a day. Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into the water if left in the sun, heated up, or reused several times. Production of the plastic (PET or polyethylene) bottles to meet our demand for bottled water takes the equivalent of about 17.6 million barrels of oil (not including transportation costs). That equals the amount of oil required to fuel more than one million vehicles in the U.S. each year. Around the world, bottling water uses about 2.7 million tons of plastic…each year. Bottled water companies mislead communities into giving away their public water in exchange for dangerous jobs. It can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself. On a weekly basis, 37,800 18-wheelers are driving around the country delivering water. The EPA sets much more stringent quality standards for tap water than the FDA does for the bottled stuff. One out of 6 people in the world does not have safe drinking water, and about 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from bad water…that we know of. This while Americans spend about $16 billion a year on bottled water.  

Ps I copied and psted that info from http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2008/12/29/10-reasons-to-stop-drinking-bottled-water/ 

Here is more info on why plastic is bad, besides the waste aspect. Bisphenol A (BPA), a compound in hard, clear polycarbonate plastics, is getting official scrutiny—and things are looking less than rosy for the controversial chemical. The U.S. government's National Toxicology Program yesterday agreed with a scientific panel that recently expressed concern about physiological changes that occur in people when they ingest BPA that has leached from plastics into their food. The Canadian government is even considering declaring the chemical toxic, reports today's New York Times. This could set the stage for banning it from plastic baby bottles, water bottles, and food containers  

I tried to paste a link to this, but FS cut it off, so I will paste the info directly, sorry if it's long, but it is important info: BPA is routinely used to line cans to prevent corrosion and food contamination; it also makes plastic cups and baby and other bottles transparent and shatterproof. When the polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins made from the chemical are exposed to hot liquids, BPA leaches out 55 times faster than it does under normal conditions, according to a new study by Scott Belcher, an endocrine biologist at the University of Cincinnati. "When we added boiling water [to bottles made from polycarbonate] and allowed it to cool, the rate [of leakage] was greatly increased," he says, to a level as high as 32 nanograms per hour. A recent report in the journal Reproductive Toxicology found that humans must be exposed to levels of BPA at least 10 times what the EPA has deemed safe because of the amount of the chemical detected in tissue and blood samples. "If, as some evidence indicates, humans metabolize BPA more rapidly than rodents," wrote study author Laura Vandenberg, a developmental biologist at Tufts University in Boston, "then human daily exposure would have to be even higher to be sufficient to produce the levels observed in human serum."  

Wow... 

"It is the unborn baby and children that investigators are most worried about," Newbold says, noting that BPA was linked to increased breast and prostate cancer occurrences, altered menstrual cycles and diabetes in lab mice that were still developing 

I believe that in 10 years+/- there will be a very bad health consequence to our upcoming generation from using to much plastics, artifical sweetners, and GMO foods (Round-up Ready). There is nothing that I can do about it personally...other than lead my family in education about use/overuse/non-use. 

The only thing we can do is educate ourselves and others. 

I agree! In the mean-time....We need to drink water! So, I guess I will stick to my watered down green tea/herbal teas! 

such great comments about water and bpa...finally, people i can relate with!! i dont think people realize how dangereous bpa really is. im sorry to hear about your water, Bird Fancier. do you live in florida? my mother is in jacksonville and she has the same water issues. they have a system on their house and use water filters...but its still hard to get the smell and bad taste out of it. green tea is an excellent choice, and it boosts metabolism! i prefer the kroger store brand...its "pomengranate, acai, and blueberry flavored green tea. i just brew and refridgerate. i dont add any sugar, it has a nice light fruity taste.  

Thanks jessberry! We don't have kroger stores in my area of CA ...I have been using celestial seasons cold brew blueberry green tea and for hot cinnamon tea I use Good Earth....very yummy.