Last night, Ashley and I caught a screening of Gasland, a film that explores natural gas drilling and its effect on water quality, air quality and human and animal health. As we’ve written about before, natural gas drilling is done through a controversial process called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” — the Gasland website explains fracking here with a cool visual.
The film is thought-provoking and at times, quite disturbing. For example, some people who live near natural gas drilling sites are suddenly able to light their water on fire, straight from the tap. Nearby residents and pets are getting sick, losing their hair and losing weight. The chemicals used in the fracking process don’t have to be disclosed due to an exemption in the law — and this means that hundreds of unknown (and some well-known and proven unsafe!) chemicals end up in our waterways.
After the screening, filmmaker Josh Fox stayed for a Q-and-A session. In it, he noted that “the culture of convenience is leading us down this path.” It was heartbreaking to hear that we are sacrificing our water quality and air quality in large part to manufacture disposable plastic products.
You can find a screening of Gasland here or catch it on HBO and HBO On Demand. Fox told us there will be a theatrical release in the fall and a big screening in Philadelphia in late September. The DVD will be released in December, but you can watch the trailer here:
The Gasland website includes many ways to take action. The Delaware Valley River Basin Commission will be holding a public meeting regarding the Marcellus Shale next Wednesday, July 14, at 1:00 p.m. at the West Trenton Volunteer Fire Company in West Trenton, NJ. Many citizens will be there to call for a complete moratorium on natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Watershed. For more information, visit Delaware Riverkeeper.
TTF, the PWD and other advocacy groups in Philadelphia work hard to keep our drinking water clean and healthy for citizens to use, so that you don’t have to spend extra money or resources to buy your water in a plastic bottle. Currently state money is used to buy bottled water for government offices. If that is not how you want your state money spent, help the Environmental Working Group tell Governor Rendell to stop spending taxpayers’ money on unnecessary bottled water.
Bottled water can be as much as 1,900 times more expensive than municipal drinking water, and it’s not necessarily any safer or cleaner. Plus, researchers have found that producing and transporting bottled water requires up to 2,000 times more energy than tap water.
But the Pennsylvania government still spends your money on bottled water.
Here at TTF, we talk a lot about how recycling can help to protect our waterways. Our Ethical Electronics Recycling Events help keep dangerous chemicals from electronics from leaching into our creeks and rivers. But what about plastics? From all of our work doing stream cleanups, we’ve found that a huge percentage of the trash we pick up is plastic — usually in the form of food or beverage packaging materials and plastic bags. (The City of Philadelphia currently recycles plastics #1 and #2, but not #3-#7. Montgomery County has different regulations.)
This month’s Grid magazine has an article on where Philadelphia residents can recycle plastics #3-7:
Because No. 5 is the next most common plastic (after 1 and 2), Weaver’s Way Co-op (weaversway.coop) collects it—including Brita filters—as part of the “Gimme 5” campaign. Plastics must be clean, dry and clearly stamped with the number 5. Collections take place on the third Saturday of each month at the Co-op’s garage (524 Carpenter Lane), and all the plastics are then shipped to the Gimme 5 processing facility in New York State. The South Street Whole Foods (929 South Street) also collects No. 5 plastics.
The other numbers are trickier. The foam variety of No. 6–Polystyrene and the dreaded No. 7–Other categories are notoriously difficult to recycle. But Recycling Services, Inc. (365 Elm Street, Pottstown, 610-323-8545) takes all comers (numbers 1 through 7), and the facility is open for public collection on Tuesdays and Saturdays (9 a.m. to 1 p.m.). They charge an $8/car gate fee, so consider loading up with your neighbors’ No. 3 through 7s, too, before you head out there.
If you drink a lot of bottled beverages, you can recycle the caps at the Big Green Earth Store (934 South Street) and at Aveda stores throughout the Philadelphia region (the Shops at Liberty Place, Cherry Hill Mall, Willow Grove Park and Exton Square).
And, in addition to recycling plastic, we can just try to use it less — especially when it comes to unnecessary purchases like bottled water!
We’ve been thinking a lot about bottled water lately. Sometimes, when we talk about the major problem with pollution in our streams and rivers, people think that means we shouldn’t drink local tap water. Instead, they think we should be importing bottled water from some supposedly pristine far-away place. As Ashley recently pointed out, this couldn’t be further from the truth. We need to be supporting our local municipal water systems who do a great job cleaning our water while we work towards cleaner local waterways. And we need to be reducing the amount of plastic waste that ends up forming islands of trash in our oceans.
Here is a great, eight-minute video that explains all of the problems with bottled water. Watch The Story of Bottled Water with Annie Leonard!
Here at TTF we do talk a lot about how dirty our local waterways are due to pollution from stormwater runoff, illegal dumping, and litter to name a few things. We discuss these issues in order to demonstrate how our day to day activities as residents of this city affect our water resource and also to discover and promote new ways that all of us can help to keep pollutants out of our water.
Many people quote these same problems as contributing factors in why they decide to purchase and consume bottled water…
I am here to say STOP! Drinking bottled water is not healthy for you or your environment.
The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) does a fantastic job of cleaning the water from our rivers, the Delaware and Schuylkill to make it safe for us to drink. Not only are they already doing a fantastic job of keeping our drinking water clean, at each of the three water treatment plants they have test projects to find newer ways to make our water even cleaner. Knowing that, why would you want to pay for something you can get for free out of the tap.
Even more importantly though, bottled water is harmful to your body and our planet. Not only is the water that you buy in a bottle not regulated as strictly as the water that comes out of your tap, your water is absorbing toxic chemicals just by sitting in a plastic bottle.
Here is how the Philadelphia Water Department monitors water quality:
Throughout the water treatment process, our plant technicians analyze the water, monitoring its quality. Supported by the very latest in advanced chemical analysis equipment, our environmental laboratories examine over 12,000 samples of water each year collected from our reservoirs at more than 65 locations across the City. Each sample undergoes an average of five (5) tests to ensure that our customers enjoy safe water, free from contamination.
And here is how the FDA regulates water quality:
FDA monitors and inspects bottled water products and processing plants as part of its general food safety program. Because FDA’s experience over the years has shown that bottled water has a good safety record, bottled water plants generally are assigned a relatively low priority for inspection… FDA’s field offices follow up on consumer and trade complaints and other leads, as appropriate, on potentially violative bottled water products… As with other types of food, FDA periodically collects and analyzes samples of bottled water. Samples come from several different sources. Some samples are collected during inspections if the inspector’s observations warrant collection to test for contaminants or if the bottled water facility has a previous history of contamination. Other samples are collected in response to trade or consumer complaints.
Now I ask you, which water do you want to drink?
For more information about why you should TAP INTO TAP WATER watch “Tapped,” a fantastic documentary outlining the real and sometimes scary facts about bottled water.
Captain Charles Moore appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman earlier this week. Moore is the first person to document the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gigantic gyre of marine litter that made up of 90% plastic waste. As Moore says, “Plastic is overtaking the natural world.”
1) Commit to reduce our own plastic consumption as much as possible.
2) Talk to our family and friends about the problem and set an example that others can follow.
3) Support measures in our communities to ban plastic bags and other single-use packaging.
4) Support Extended Producer Responsibility legislation which would require manufacturers to provide for the entire life cycle of their products and remove the burden from communities and local governments. EPR laws in Europe have proven that when companies have to figure out how to recycle their stuff, they end up using fewer, less toxic materials in the first place.
This issue can seem depressing and overwhelming, but there are things we can do. What other steps can we take? We want to hear from you!
This New York Timesarticle shows how much damage we’ve done to our oceans.
From the article:
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.
Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.
But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world’s trash-filled gyres.
Check out the trailer for the new documentary, Tapped, which casts a critical eye on the bottled water industry. The film begins with this depressing statement:
By the year 2030, two-thirds of the world will be lacking access to clean drinking water. This is a problem every single person will be dealing with regardless of where they live in the world.
If that doesn’t shake you up, just watch the trailer below and see the images of the huge amounts of plastic floating in the ocean.
There are currently no screenings listed for Philadelphia, but we’ll keep checking back and let you know if we find any. We’re also working on hosting our own screening and discussion. For now, you can view more clips on the Tapped website and read Beth Terry’s great summary of the film at her blog, Fake Plastic Fish.
Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco in March 2007 enacted an ordinance that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags. Los Angeles is set to impose a ban if the state of California does not enact a statewide 25-cent fee per bag by July.
About 90 percent of the bags used in the United States are not recycled.
While Philadelphia is still struggling with the issue of plastic bags, the Australian town of Bundanoon recently took the bold environmental stance of banning the sale of bottled water. The most interesting tidbit from the article:
The measure will not impose penalties on those who don’t comply when it goes into effect in September. Still, all the business owners voluntarily agreed to follow it, recognizing the financial and environmental drawbacks of bottled water.
Pretty cool, Bundanoon!
TTF Watershed Partnership, Inc.
One Awbury Road
Awbury Arboretum
Philadelphia, PA 19138 info@ttfwatershed.org
