Water & Air – Filter Systems News

Thinking of going camping this fall season? Across the country the leaves have changed and there are a multitude of beautiful colors to be seen.  The cool, crisp air means less bugs and clear night skies full of stars. If you, like me, are not THRILLED at the prospect of sleeping outside and not having clean fresh water to drink, the following products will save the day.

Katadyn MyBottle Water Purifier- Blue Splash

This sleek and stylish Katadyn water bottle does more than simply hold water. This water bottle features a personal filtration system directly inside the bottle. The built in virustat and cyst filter will remove bacteria, viruses, cysts and other impurities from virtually all fresh water sources. In addition, the carbon cartridge removes chemicals, making your water taste better. The MyBottle is even registered with the United States Environmental Protection Agency for its efficiency at removing impurities.

Use the Katadyn MyBottle to filter the following water sources:

1)      Lakes

2)      Ponds

3)      Rivers

4)      Streams

Katadyn Mini Ultralight Series Microfilter- Black

                The Katadyn Mini Ultralight Microfilter is ideal for camping and hiking. This filter removes protozoa, cysts, sediment, dirt, viruses, spores dirt and bacteria down to 0.2 microns in size. This microfilter has a 2,000 gallon capacity before needing a filter replacement. Weighing less than a pound, this easy to carry filtration system is great when you do not have a readily available fresh water source.

Klean Kanteen 18 oz Bottle & Loop Cap- Red

    The Kleen Kanteen 18 oz Bottle is BPA free and is manufactured out of the highest quality stainless steel. This is an eco friendly alternative to bringing a 24 pack of bottled water to your next camping trip. The convenient loop cap makes it easy to attach to backpacks and camping equipment.  This water bottle comes in a variety of colors.

 Nite Ize Carbiner, Klean Kanteen S-Biner # 3

         The Kleen Kanteen Carbiner will make it easy for you and your family to attach your Kleen Kanteen water bottle to belts, backpacks and camping equipment. Manufactured out of the same stainless steel as your Kleen Kanteen water bottle, two snaps is all it takes to bring your bottle everywhere you need it to go.

Vapur Anti Bottle Water Bottle- Pink 16 oz.

Perfect for the little campers in your party,  this reusable water bottle  features a space saving design. They are extremely flexible and almost completely collapsible, making this water bottle ideal when you are tight on space. The matching clip on the water bottle makes it easy to clip onto hiking bags and camping equipment. This water bottle is made out of BPA free plastic and holds 16 ounces.

With these easy to use products, you can be sure that your next camping and hiking trip will be a great success!

The drinking water fountain has been around for centuries, but two different men invented the modern drinking fountain in the early 1900’s: Halsey Willard Taylor, and Luther Haws. Each man founded a company that produced drinking fountains. Taylor founded the Halsey Taylor Company, and Haws the Haws Sanitary Drinking Faucet Co. The way that water is served in public places was changed by Taylor and Haws.

Halsey Taylor developed his drinking fountain in part because his father had died from typhoid fever caused by water that was contaminated. Luther Haws worked both as a part-time plumber and as a sanitary inspector in Berkeley, Calif. One day at a public school he was inspecting he saw children drinking water from a tin cup tied to a faucet. Both men shared fears about the health risks associated with public drinking water. Water fountains developed by both men are still widely in use around the world.

In a couple of earlier blogs we mentioned two ongoing efforts to map U.S. water fountains, both smartphone apps: Thermos‘ Oasis Places, and WeTap, started by The Pacific Institute and Google. WeTap’s current map shows that this effort has spread across the U.S. from its origins in Berkeley, Calif. and the Bay Area. Dr. Peter Gleick, President of The Pacific Institute, maintains that the declining availability of drinking fountains has led to the rise of bottled water sales: “one of the reasons for the explosive growth in the sales of bottled water in the past two decades (the average American now drinks nearly 30 gallons of commercial bottled water per year, up from 1 gallon in 1980), is the disappearance of public drinking water fountains.”

Today, many feel that the drinking water fountain may be going the way of the telephone booth. Concerns about the sanitation and safety of drinking water fountains may be fueling their loss, in addition to boosting bottled water’s popularity. But bottled water has been shown to be dangerous to the environment and user, as well as being prohibitively expensive. An attractive alternative are hydration stations, machines that deliver filtered water, which are being installed in many schools and offices. In addition to the water offered by hydration stations often being purer and safer than drinking water fountains and bottled water, they help eliminate single use plastic bottles. Hydration stations are especially popular on college campuses, where activist students have been making others aware of the disadvantages of bottled water, and raising awareness about the safety of schools’ drinking water fountains. Maybe hydration stations will eventually supplant water fountains and even bottled water as the source of choice for drinking water.

“Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it. We have a huge advantage over the generations of people who have come before us, because we can understand water and we can use it smartly.”

– Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

Charles Fishman, bestselling author of The Wal-Mart Effect has most recently turned his attention to water. The leap from discounted mega-giant to Earth’s most essential resource may seem like a big one, but Fishman is interested in relationships-whether it’s to Wal-Mart or water.  Fishman first began his flirtation with water in a 2007 article entitled, “Message in a Bottle”, published in Fast Company magazine. In this piece Fishman lamented, “Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets– $15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year” (Fishman, 2007).

Fast forward to 2011, and Fishman tackles both the history and future of water in our world. The Big Thirst seeks to open people’s eyes to the reality of water in the twenty-first century. Similar to what the book and film, Fast Food Nation did for revealing the atrocities of the United States fast food industry, Thirst delves into people’s water consciousness. For example, do you know where your water goes when it swirls down the drain, flushes down the toilet or leaves your washing machine? A majority of Americans have no idea.

Also consider that most Americans don’t know where the majority of their daily water usage comes from. Do you? In 1999, a group of researchers used electronic water-flow sensors in 1,888 homes for four weeks. The results showed that the primary way American’s use water daily is by flushing the toilet. About five times a day per person if you want to put a figure on it. We literally flush 5.7 billion gallons of water down the toilet a day (Fishman, 2011).

The Big Thirst’s strength stems from Fishman’s ability to storytell. He connects you to your relationship with water in a multitude of ways. Take for example, this excerpt, “Like so much of modern life, safe, reliable water and sewer service is both essential and a complete mystery. We have no idea where our water comes from, we have no idea what happens to it when the dishwasher is done with it. We have no idea what effort is required to get the water to us, and no idea what’s required to get rid of it. That ignorance doesn’t matter, until things start to go wrong.”

Water is an essential resource in our daily lives- and most of us do not understand how much we rely on it, how much goes into getting it to our faucet, and what we would do if it were to stop flowing freely. Charles Fishman explores these questions through fascinating stories intertwining his personal travels to the water bottling plants of San Pellegrino, Italy and Poland Spring, Maine.  The main question being, why don’t we value our most essential resource the way we should?

Fans of Vitamin Water may be disappointed to learn that vitamins may lose potency if stored in water for extended periods of time.

Enter Activate – the only brand of bottled water on the market that has vitamins, antioxidants and other supplements in powder form hidden in the cap, which are released with just one twist, just before drinking. How did this concept come to be?

“Friends Anders Eisner and Burke Eiteljorg were sitting in the Denver airport four years ago. Anders was trying to pour Airborne, a supposed cold-fighting dietary supplement, into a bottle of water. Burke was doing the same with Emergen-C, another vitamin drink mix. Both were making a mess. There had to be a tidier way, they decided.”

Activate comes in eight flavors. Some emphasize health and immunity boosters, while others are workout drinks with electrolytes. The drinks contain Stevia, a much healthier alternative to the sugar used in Vitamin Water and other similar beverages. While we applaud the company’s innovation and drive to be healthier than most, we still have the problem of plastic bottle waste on our hands. Perhaps Eisner and Eiteljorg wouldn’t have made such a mess if they had a wide-mouthed reusable bottle like this Klean Kanteen instead. Moreover, the beverage sells for $1.79 to $2.29 per bottle:

“Some balk at the price, but Holland [the company's president] says, ‘If you bought a bottle of water and Emergen-C it would cost you $2.’”

Precisely why we shouldn’t be buying bottles of water in the first place! We’ve said it many times and we’ll say it again. Save money with your own supplement packets and/or pills, and fill up your reusable water bottle with filtered tap water instead.

The Australian Standard for organic products says that natural products like water cannot be labeled “organic.” But what if that label is part of the brand or company name?

Australian brands, Organic Springs, Active Organic, and Organic Falls sell purified tap water under the Active Organic Spring name, though the water is not organic and is not sourced from a spring. Legitimate organic producers are annoyed at companies that use the term in their brand names, as it can mislead consumers. “Organic” is a term that is typically used to describe agricultural produce, and not natural substances like water or air.

The company, in its defense, states that it is not actually claiming that the water is organic, though the term is used in the brand name. Still – the word can be misleading to consumers, no matter the context. The bottled water industry caught on to the power of this kind of advertising long ago when they began marketing their product with pictures of glaciers, mountains and freshwater springs on the bottles. These days, many consumers will blindly purchase a product labeled “organic”, simply because the word has such a powerful, positive connotation, even if they don’t know what the term itself really means. And some products labeled “organic” are not any healthier or better-tasting than their non-organic versions.

What do you think? If given the choice between a bottle simply labeled “purified tap water” and a bottle labeled “purified tap water” with “organic” in the brand name, which would you be more likely to choose?

Pura Vida H2O has come out with what it hopes will become the “ATM Machine of Bottled Water”, but without the bottle. The concept is similar to that of EcoWell, a filtered water “vending machine” which we wrote about last year. Basically, anyone wanting water on the go can bring their own reusable bottle and refill it with purified tap water from one of Pura Vida’s filtered water dispensers, for 50 cents – a fraction of what it costs to buy plastic bottled water, and 5 cents less than what EcoWell charges. 450 machines are expected to be up-and-running around the country by mid-summer, and some of them will sell reusable water bottles for $10 to accommodate empty-handed, thirsty patrons.

Pros?

At first glance this sounds like the perfect innovative solution to the problem of plastic bottle waste. The average person saves about $2,100, along with over 1,400 plastic bottles a year by taking advantage of these filtered water dispensers. Simply bring your own reusable water bottle from home, and you’ve got the convenience of bottled water, without the environmental waste.

Cons?

50 cents is a fraction of the cost of your average bottle of water, but it is a LARGE fraction, considering that tap water is regularly tested and costs only half a cent per glass. And if you upgrade from the 16-oz size to the 24-oz size, you’re paying 75 cents instead of 50. While that is about half the cost of a bottle of water, with the added benefit of saving the environment, many people might question the idea of paying that much for water, period, filtered or not. Especially when you can buy a Filtrete Water Station, (a.k.a 4 bottle water filter) which will refill 4 reusable bottles at once, with filtered tap water right from your kitchen sink. These bottles can be stored in your refrigerator, and taken on-the-go, just as easily as a Klean Kanteen, and the cost for water is not nearly as much. The “ATM Machine” concept is also a little unsettling, since ATM’s are typically associated with unreasonable, annoying charges and usage fees.

What do you guys think? Is the Pura Vida concept a good idea? Is 50 cents worth the convenience of filtered water on-the-go? Or would you rather use a Filtrete Water Station and do it yourself for much less?

Have you ever had a headache so bad, you’d rob a store for the cure? The Augusta Chronicle reported today that police are searching for a man who robbed a Dollar General this morning. The man entered the store with a towel over his face, and asked the clerk for a bottled water and some Goody’s headache powder. He then put a gun on the counter and asked for money.

At this point it’s unclear whether the man actually obtained anything before he left, as he told the clerk to go to the rear of the building while he fled. But it is clear that he was in desperate need of something.

This is not the first bottled water robbery to take place, and it probably won’t be the last. Last year, we wrote about a man who stole bottled water from a 13-year-old kid who had set up a water stand to make a few extra bucks on a hot summer day. There is one lesson to be learned from all this: stay away from bottled water. As we’ve demonstrated before, it is highly addictive (especially if it contains nicotine), and we all know that bottled water addiction can make people do crazy things…

Want to quit smoking, but can’t? NicLite is here to help. This specially formulated, organic, non-addictive nicotine bottled water offers you an alternative to smoking. Whether you’re a heavy smoker, moderate smoker, or social smoker, you can drink NicLite to curb your craving for cigarettes.

The makers of this product claim that it is much safer than cigarettes, because it is carcinogen-free. Consumers testify that NicLite has helped them reduce or quit their smoking habit after only a few weeks of drinking the water. The convenient plastic bottle packaging lets you sip whenever you feel the urge to smoke, whether you’re in your car, on an airplane, at work, or in a restaurant where smoking indoors has been banned – nonsmokers around you will no longer have to suffer the fate of secondhand smoke because of your bad habit.

At first glance, NicLite seems like a great solution to anyone’s nicotine addiction. However, upon closer examination, it seems that in the long run, you’re simply replacing one bad habit with another. Before you know it, your smoking addiction becomes a bottled water addiction that can be just as dangerous to you and your peers as secondhand smoke. I can’t help but wonder how many of those who have used NicLite have actually been able to kick the bottled water habit once they quit smoking. Do you have to continue to drink NicLite water to avoid your cigarette cravings?

As a nonsmoker, it’s difficult for me to take an authoritative stance on this issue, so I’d like to hear the point of view of others who have struggled with quitting. Do you think nicotine bottled water is a viable solution to the problem of nicotine addiction? If not, what alternatives could you suggest?

Bottled rainwater is a growing trend among avid premium bottled water consumers. On Saturday, February 26, six bottled rainwaters will compete in the award-winning Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting competition: Richard’s Rainwater, Oregon Rain, Texas Rain, Tasmanian Rain, SparkleTap and Rainwater Management Solutions. These six will be among over 100 bottled waters from around the globe. Since it is a bottled water “tasting” competition, I can’t predict who the winner will be because I don’t drink bottled water, but if the contest also took into account the sustainability of the process by which these waters are bottled, supposedly these six would be at the top.

That’s because bottled rainwater is supposed to be a “greener” alternative to other bottled waters. Rainwater harvesting is highly eco-friendly and has a lower carbon footprint than the processes used by conventional water bottlers. Rainwater catchments involve minimal processing. Rainwater is already pretty clean and does not require the complex filtration that chemically-treated water requires. Not to mention, many of these bottled rainwaters use eco-friendly packaging in the form of recyclable glass or biodegradable plastic. Tasmanian Rain even has an offsetting agreement with Elementree – an Australian company that plants trees based on the bottler’s water shipments and overall emissions.

But is bottled rainwater really greener? Even if it is greener, I don’t know that you could say it’s “green.” And I still think it’s got a long way to go to compete with filtered tap water. Putting something natural and eco-friendly inside of a plastic container (even if it is “biodegradable” plastic) just seems a little… ironic. Plus, not everyone can afford to purchase this water. It is, after all, more expensive than your average Deer Park.

What do you guys think?

We don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that water filtration advocates around the world are going to be disappointed today, because according to several news sources, bottled water sales saw a 4.2 percent increase this last year.

And, you may want to sit down for this next part…

Sales are expected to jump another 3 percent in 2011.

But don’t lose hope. Don’t let this news discourage you. You can make a difference. You can help us put an end to this madness.

It’s very simple: spread the word. Tell your friends the truth about bottled water. For example:

1. Bottled water manufacturers use clever marketing tactics to fool consumers into believing that their product is the absolute best, and most convenient way to obtain pure water that is safe to drink.
2. Bottled water is bad for the environment. Millions of non-biodegradable plastic bottles go unrecycled each year.
3. Bottled water is very expensive, and is really nothing more than filtered tap water that you could easily get from home, at a fraction of the cost, with a quality water filter.
4. Bottling companies like Fiji are taking good water away from the poor people in Fiji who really need it, and are shipping it long distances and selling it to Americans at ridiculous prices.
5. Bottled water won’t necessarily protect you from hexavalent chromium contamination… a little known fact that may have contributed to the 2010 spike in sales. The Environmental Working Group recently discovered this contaminant in water supplies in 31 cities across the U.S., and they recommend a good quality water filter over bottled water as a solution. In addition, the EWG recently published a bottled water scorecard, giving filtered tap water the highest score available.
6. Yes, many bottled waters do not contain fluoride, but you can get water that is fluoride-free right out of your tap by simply installing a reverse osmosis filter. Many RO filters also reduce chromium-vi, and in the long run, will save you lots of money.
7. The bottled water brand name “Evian” spells “Naive” backwards…

These seven facts may be summed up in seven words: Friends don’t let friends drink bottled water. (Okay, so maybe it’s cliche, but you get the point.) I’m guessing that you probably have a lot of friends – virtual or otherwise – and social media is one of the best ways for you to help spread the word so that your friends are not labeled among the “naive” consumers. What’s more: we’ve made it really easy for you to do so; simply hit the “tweet” and “like” buttons at the top of this post. And if you’d like to spread the word on other social networks, you can do so by clicking the buttons below this post as well. Every share counts!

We’d also like to thank all of our friends who have thus far supported our efforts to provide everyone with affordable access to clean water straight from the tap!