Category — Drinking water

This fountain is in the Carter Lane Gardens, across from St. Paul’ s Cathedral in London, and it’s part of the city’s “Refill on Tap” program (you can read a bit more about the fountain here). Would you fill your bottle here? Do you think the fountain should also have a place to sip water, for the container-less population? (Thanks to Annie Bolitho for the photo.)

The Toronto Star has an article today on public drinking water fountains, in which swab tests of spigots revealed high bacterial counts. It’s not until the story’s 26th paragraph that we learn “Most bacteria are harmless and even beneficial to us but a few species are pathogenic and can cause infectious disease.” Then, farther down, we learn there have been no reported cases of illness from a city fountain. Finally, this: “The Star’s results should not discourage people from drinking at water fountains, says one of Canada’s top environmental microbiologists. … “We will never live, and cannot survive in an environment free of microorganisms,” said Ryerson University’s Gideon Wolfaardt, a Canada Research Chair who supplied the Star with researchers from his laboratory.

My takeaway was this: fountains need scrubbing, frequently. Just because there are bacteria on a spigot doesn’t mean healthy people will get sick from drinking the water.  Don’t swab the spigot with your tongue.

Update: just learned that Food and Water Watch’s Renew America’s Water campaign — which calls on Congress to establish a dedicated source of funding ($30 billion) for water and wastewater infrastructure — also seeks to establish federal grants for schools that want to repair, replace, update or test their drinking water systems.

Renewal

The Telegraph reports that — surprise! — we humans are consuming our natural capital  (food, fuel, and other resources) faster than the earth can either replenish them or absorb our wastes. Last year, we began eating into our capital on September 23; this year’s Overshoot Day will fall on August 21 (according to the New Economic Foundation, humanity first went into global ecological debt on December 19, 1987). For a fuller explanation of this grim metric, read here.

Here is someone seriously tone deaf to the growing backlash, in the U.S. and Canada, among other places, against bottled water. Michael Gerbitz has just introduced Genesis: Living Waters of Israel – bottled in Israel and shipped to the Americas, with a portion of profits benefiting Israeli “victims of terror.”

“Americans drink lots of bottled water – especially in the summer,” Gerbitz is quoted in a news release that I was hoping is a hoax intended to embarrass easily provoked bloggers. “Why not buy water from Israel and help Israel economically, socially and politically at the same time?” Let me ask: is it really in Israel’s interest to export a totally unnecessary product in bottles derived from a resource—oil—that likely comes from Israel’s enemies, and then send them around the planet using even more of that oil? (And yes, reader, I know that I buy and burn my own share of Middle East oil, and I realize the amount of oil consumed by bottles and their associated production and transport is minuscule in the larger scheme of things, but still: we’re talking about a totally unnecessary product!)

The Genesis website offers a rationale for the business:  “In the Book of Jeremiah, the Creator is called the Source of Living Waters. Just as water continuously flows, the Creator showers us with endless streams of kindness and blessing. We gratefully acknowledge the Creator as the ultimate Source of life’s blessings and believe it is our role to emulate His kind ways by giving to others and sharing life’s blessings.” Leave aside the fact that Gerbitz is selling this water, not giving it away (it wouldn’t be the first time blessings are sold), and let’s ask if the Creator would really want all those bottles winging their way around the world and ending up… oh, just about anywhere. (The vast majority of water bottles in the U.S. are not recycled.)

Around the world, religious leaders are working to apply biblical principles of stewardship to the environment– in a movement known as Creation Care — and many communities of faith have pledged to eliminate or reduce consumption of bottled water. Mr. Gerbitz: you might want to rethink your business plan.

This is a really important question. I don’t know the answer for sure, but microbiologists I’ve asked say it’s unlikely (see my comments and other responses to my post on the ten rotating water stations in New York, from July 6, 2010).

Here’s a photo of a fountain in Bundanoon, Australia, a town where merchants voluntarily quit selling bottled water. If you were a germaphobe, would you drink from this?

And if you wouldn’t, would you refill your bottle from a spigot dedicated to bottle refilling (that is, a spigot from which sipping is impossible)?

Australia sends a lot of ships, laden with iron ore, to Japan. Then the ships head back to Australia, carrying seawater as ballast. Australia is a dry country, in dire need of fresh water. Japan currently discharges almost all of its treated sewage, which started as fresh water, into the sea. Do you see where we’re going here? Read this article in Asahi Shimbun, which describes how and why Japan may soon be selling its treated sewage to Australia, for use in those iron-ore operations (and replacing the use of fresh water expensively derived from sea water).

This is a pilot project, and I’m sure there will be some kinks to work out, but I believe we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this water reuse and recycling in the future. (Transporting water, which is heavy, ain’t cheap: but in this case waste water is replacing sea water on a ship that’s got to get back to Australia anyway.) Fresh water is a precious and finite resource. Yes, it recycles and cleans itself as it moves from one physical state to another, but with more and more people on the planet, polluting water faster than we or Mom Earth can clean it, there’s less of the stuff to go around. Why discharge expensively treated wastewater into the ocean when it can be used yet again in industry or — depending on its level of treatment — for agriculture or human consumption? (For that matter, why use expensively treated drinking water merely to flush away human waste?) To see how Orange County, California, cleans its waste water to a level fit for drinking, check out my article in the New York Times Magazine.)

Yesterday, New York’s Department of Environmental Protection announced it would be rotating ten portable water fountains around the city this summer, to high-traffic areas like parks, green markets, and special events.  (Here’s a schedule of where the fountains will be, in case you’re planning your day around low-cost, healthful hydration. )

I’m all for fountains, as anyone who’s read my blog, my books, or my other babblings well knows. And I applaud this experiment: who wouldn’t want more places to drink cold, clean water for free? The fountains have spigots for sipping and spigots for refilling bottles and even a spigot for watering pets. Bravo. But why bother placing them in parks, which already have fountains? I’d argue that we need fountains most in our vast deserts of concrete (there will be one in Times Square now and then — that’s a perfect place to leave a fountain in place year-round). And we need exponentially more of them. The DEP’s “water on the go” fountains are hooked up to fire hydrants, which are already fixtures on our streets, plumbed and nearly ready to burble. Why not make the fountains — with a smaller footprint, handicapped accessible, and frost resistant — permanent as well?

I realize the installation and maintenance of fountains costs money, but WotG has many partners, and surely there are many more organizations willing to buy some naming rights to become associated in the public imagination with the city’s greatest natural resource, with health, a generosity of spirit (have a drink!) and a smaller environmental footprint (less bottle waste, fewer water trucks on the road).

I’m thrilled by this advance, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder, also, if these fountains are a pilot project, an experiment to measure how many people will actually drink tap water from a public fountain. The city’s past reluctance to embrace a more widespread fountain program — installing thousands of fountains throughout the boroughs– has long made me wonder: does the mayor know something about our water that we don’t? (Read my book Bottlemania for the straight dope on the city’s water quality report, plus some obscure B sides that go above and beyond. I concluded the water’s fine. Mike Bloomberg: anything else I should know?)

If you’re in the city this summer, I urge you to drink up and get counted. Let the fountains go forth and multiply.

I’ve always been impressed by the fierce love people have for local springs, and the ferocity of those who’ve lost access to such resources. (I’m talking here about places where water burbles from the earth and those in the know collect it for free, usually from a pipe banged into the ground, in bottles to bring home.) In days of yore, my family would stop along route 1 in Maine and quench our thirst at a rocky seep. The water was cold, clear, and delicious.  County boards of health don’t like such situations: the water isn’t tested or monitored.  Years ago, an inspector told me, “You never know, the underground stream could be running through a cemetary.” Across the nation, springs have been closing due to liability concerns. (Find an open and FREE spring at www.findaspring.com, which also lists the water’s pH, TDS, and temperature.)

The Long Island Press reports today that the Suffolk County department of health services has snipped access to a roadside spring in Cold Spring Harbor, meanwhile allowing the adjacent private yacht club to continue imbibing.  The health department claims the shallow well tested positive for 1, 2 dichloropropane, an industrial chemical and known carcinogen, in 2003. But in fact, the spring’s contaminant level is the same as the legal level found in wells supplying more than two dozen towns in Suffolk County. (Feel better?)

It’s an interesting case: the right to drink — public access — apparently trumps possible qualms about quality. Protesting the closing of the spring, Joe Oliva said, “We demand the town turn on the water for the public.  It’s like someone has reached into their souls, ripped something out of their lives. They can’t trust their government and that’s not right.” (Can’t trust the government to be honest about the reason the spring was closed off? Can’t trust the government to provide equal access, in perpetuity, to groundwater that appeared to be part of the public domain? Unclear.)

People really don’t like having things taken away from them – whether it’s their choice to buy water in a bottle or drink it from a spring, or the right to drink water the government says is unsafe. “It’s a tragedy,” said one man who’d been visiting the Cold Spring source for 15 years, pointing to a couple of skateboarders.  “It’s a tragedy for those two guys right there. It’s a tragedy for us and anybody else who wanted to come here. It’s just a tragedy.”

I recently had a nice chat with KCRW’s Evan Kleiman, host of “Good Food,” about water recycling in Orange County (CA). Take a listen here (I’m up second, followed by pieces on vertical farming, climate-friendly meat, and more).

There was a piece in the NY Times yesterday about U. C. campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on bottled water (Nestle’s Arrowhead brand in five-gallon bottles) despite the system’s budget cuts and budget threats. The reporter, Scott James, asked some smart, commonsensical questions, like “So what’s actually wrong with the water supply in these places?” (A: nothing)  “Are there contaminants of concern in the local pipes?” (A: Actually, the person who ordered the water hadn’t even read any test reports) “Don’t these buildings already have sinks with faucets?” (A: I’m not even going to answer that one.)

To me, the piece says Let’s not drink bottled water for bad reasons. Do a little research. Read your utility’s consumer confidence report (they come out annually; you can find yours online); do further testing at the tap (send a sample to an independent, state-certified lab. You can find one through this EPA website). Problems with your water? Work with others on solving them (replacing aging pipes, cleaning up pollution). I know, it’s not as easy as grabbing a plastic bottle from the store shelf. But what choice do we have in the long run? For reasons economic, environmental, and social, we can’t all rely on bottled water all the time.

(The piece quotes the ever excellent Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, whose new book, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, is now on sale. Check it out.)