Water & Air – Filter Systems News

Stone City Bottled Water in Anamosa will soon distribute “his-and-hers” vitamin-enhanced bottled water – branded as H 10 O, with 10 essential gender-specific vitamins in each bottle – to local stores in 60 Iowa and Illinois counties. Men’s flavors include “Citrus Sport,” “Lemon Ice Tea,” and “Orange Energy.” Women’s flavors are “Berry Sport,” “Peach Mango Tea,” and “Tropical Energy.” The company sales account manager, Patrick Lage admits that there is really not much difference between the flavors for men and those for women. Mainly, the men’s bottles have more B vitamins. Both men and woman can drink all six flavors without any problems.  These bottles will be sold for a promotional price of $1 per bottle and then switch to a range between $1.59 and $1.79.

(Seriously?)

This is almost as ridiculous as the Candwich (sandwich in a can). Are bottled water companies getting desperate in the wake of environmentalist efforts? There is even an “environment” tab in the “About Us” section on the H 10 O website, to inform the consumer that these bottles are made with PET plastic, “the most easily recycled plastic available.” They’re not fooling me though. My advice? Save your money. Buy a water filter, take a multivitamin, eat healthy and exercise. It sounds like a lot, but the result is much more worthwhile in the end.

New York City Times Square was evacuated for the second time this week due to reports of a “suspicious package.”  The package was just a few blocks away from where a vehicle loaded with explosives was found about a week ago.  In a city prone to terrorism, the paranoia seems natural.  What makes this story so noteworthy for us is that it drives home the point we have been desperately trying to make all along – bottled water is dangerous!

What does bottled water have to do with anything, you ask?

The package in question was a soft cooler full of water bottles.  The brand is unknown and irrelevant, because bottled water of any kind is not a good thing for our planet.  This was obviously not a terrorist attack, as the package was found to be harmless.  But what was it? Why did someone leave a cooler of water bottles in Times Square, just blocks away from where a suspicious vehicle warranted a bomb threat last week?  Perhaps the discovery of this package was no coincidence.  Perhaps the water gods are trying to tell us something here:  besides crowding our landfills and contributing significantly to the pollution and degradation of our environment, bottled water is a potentially explosive threat to the human race (pun intended.)  The message is clear.  It’s time to drop the bottle and get a water filter.

Yes, you read that correctly.  We have run across a new kind of filter, folks.  This one doesn’t quite match up to the “human” variety, but it comes close…

Thousands of hair salons nationwide have donated hair clippings to Matter of Trust – an environmental organization that is involved in a project that collects hair and nylon stockings to make oil booms and mats.

Each strand of hair has scales on it that attract and collect oil, which explains why most of us shampoo our hair daily.  However, this basic fact has not just been applied by shampoo companies.  The oil booms and mats made from salon hair clippings is now effectively being used to clean up the damage left by the recent Gulf spill.  Hair is stuffed into nylon stockings that are dragged along the coast, sopping up oil which sticks to the scales, while the water filters out.

Oil spills can do great damage to marine life, including the sea monkeys, oysters and other creatures that act as natural water filters.  Such an emergency requires a better remedy than bottled water.  Here, we have yet another example of how water filtration is important to our lives as well as to the health of our environment.

It’s a question we’ve been bombarded with since yesterday morning, when the Associated Press published an article stating that United States manufacturers and drugmakers have legally released 271 million or more pounds of pharmaceuticals into water sources that often provide drinking water.
During this “PharmaWater” investigation, the AP identified 22 compounds present in drinking water. Included in these compounds are such chemicals as lithium, antibiotics, sedatives, mood stabilizers, sex hormones, skin-bleaching cream and chemicals used to combat head lice and worms.
Yet while drugmakers and manufacturers are certainly responsible for a large portion of the pharmaceuticals in our water, consumers of the pharmaceuticals are just as responsible for depositing pharmaceuticals back into the water supply. After taking these pharmaceuticals, consumers excrete the unabsorbed remainders into the toilet, where they enter the water supply. Flushing drugs down the toilet is a more direct way of doing this, and one that is surprisingly common.
Perhaps the only thing scarier than all of these pharmaceuticals in our drinking water is that there is currently no filter that removes pharmaceuticals from tap water. While companies are currently working on filters that remove pharmaceuticals from water, none do as of yet. Some theorize that filters using activated carbon may work, as the carbon has been shown to capture organic substances that may be found in pharmaceuticals. But as of now, the testing for pharmaceuticals is too insufficient to say whether or not this is the case.
So while we cannot say for certain whether these filters remove pharmaceuticals, we can say that many of our filters do remove contaminants that we know can be harmful to your health, such as arsenic, lead, chlorine, cysts, total dissolved solids, toxic heavy metals and bacteria.
Give us a call to discuss your specific filtration needs. Better yet, consider purchasing one of our many home testing kits, which will tell you exactly what is in your water (again, except for pharmaceuticals).
Then, when you know what’s in your water, give us a call and we’ll suggest a filter that will remove the undesired contaminants.