Submitted by Norm Roulet on Wed, 01/24/2007 - 13:55.
I watch the BBC 11 PM World News, rather than the local Northeast Ohio news, because I want an international perspective on affairs in America and world-wide. To learn what is happening in Northeast Ohio, I use the Plain Dealer as one frame of reference but depend on personal research, involvement in the community and connectedness through networks and alternative media, increasingly found through the Internet, to know what is happening in the region. The main reason I find it necessary to look outside the US mainstream for news is well documented by a project out of Sonoma State University called Project Censored, "which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major national news media." Below is their list of stories over-looked and/or self-censored by the country's major national news media in 2007 - how does this fit with your observations on the world as reported by mainstream media in NEO and America?
Submitted by Susan Miller on Thu, 01/25/2007 - 10:42.
This is fascinating. Thank you for posting it! I was first off grabbed by the bottled water story. I was interested to read it because of a statistic I read while visiting the Green show at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art back in September. The show was called Massive Change.
The statistic is that a staggering 250,000 single serving water bottles are "thrown away" (not recycled) every hour in the US alone.
Here's a sample to encourage you to read article #22.
"More fossil fuels are used in packaging the water. Most water bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from crude oil. “Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand alone requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,” Arnold notes.
Once it has been emptied, the bottle must be dumped. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals tied to a host of human and animal health problems. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year. Of the bottles deposited for recycling in 2004, the U.S. exported roughly 40 percent to destinations as far away as China, requiring yet more fossil fuel.
Meanwhile, communities where the water originates risk their sources running dry. More than fifty Indian villages have complained of water shortages after bottlers began extracting water for sale under the Coca-Cola Corporation’s Dasani label. Similar problems have been reported in Texas and in the Great Lakes region of North America, where farmers, fishers, and others who depend on water for their livelihoods are suffering from concentrated water extraction as water tables drop quickly."
In Toronto transit shelters sport this ad for tap water. We don't want to think about water quality or conservation living here alongside a lake, but we may need to rethink that. It is a delicate balance... a complex issue.
Also I emailed the Roundup article to my son's pediatrician. He does lots of research and publishes newsletters and pamphlets on various health issues for his practice's patients. I asked if they had a stance on the issue. I'll let you all know if he responds. I am stunned at the number of landscapers who live by this product all in the name of time savings. We are endeavoring to remove our front lawn grass without using the dastardly product. I don't want to kill my dogs or sicken the folks who walk by.
Submitted by Norm Roulet on Thu, 01/25/2007 - 13:37.
I can't imagine buying bottled water - it is such a waste of resources. But I have noticed on and off, this winter, that the Cleveland tap water has been cloudy or tasted aweful. I read in the Plain Dealer the other day that some equipment malfunctioned, causing the bad taste, but that the water was safe to drink. I don't believe we are being told the whole story by the Cleveland Water Department. Another water quality concern I have in NEO is with lead exposure. In the November 2006 Salon was an article titled "Lead on tap: An alarming return of lead in drinking water is being ignored by the EPA and municipal officials" that reports many large, old, urban water systems are having very serious problems with lead contamination in pipes and so water due to a change in a chemical used to clean the water, and there have been cover-ups in cities that have resulted in many people being lead poisoned. I haven't heard anything about this one way or the other here but it goes to reason that Cleveland has the same problem. Here's how the situation is playing out in Washington, D.C.: "In Washington, tens of thousands of people unwittingly drank tap water contaminated with lead for several years; in a few cases, the tap water contained enough lead to be classified as a hazardous waste." Perhaps we should be drinking bottled water here after all... I definitely use a Brita filter on all water I use for drinking and even cooking! I'll investigate...
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bottled H20 not the answer
This is fascinating. Thank you for posting it! I was first off grabbed by the bottled water story. I was interested to read it because of a statistic I read while visiting the Green show at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art back in September. The show was called Massive Change.
The statistic is that a staggering 250,000 single serving water bottles are "thrown away" (not recycled) every hour in the US alone.
Here's a sample to encourage you to read article #22.
"More fossil fuels are used in packaging the water. Most water bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from crude oil. “Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand alone requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,” Arnold notes.
Once it has been emptied, the bottle must be dumped. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals tied to a host of human and animal health problems. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year. Of the bottles deposited for recycling in 2004, the U.S. exported roughly 40 percent to destinations as far away as China, requiring yet more fossil fuel.
Meanwhile, communities where the water originates risk their sources running dry. More than fifty Indian villages have complained of water shortages after bottlers began extracting water for sale under the Coca-Cola Corporation’s Dasani label. Similar problems have been reported in Texas and in the Great Lakes region of North America, where farmers, fishers, and others who depend on water for their livelihoods are suffering from concentrated water extraction as water tables drop quickly."
In Toronto transit shelters sport this ad for tap water. We don't want to think about water quality or conservation living here alongside a lake, but we may need to rethink that. It is a delicate balance... a complex issue.
Also I emailed the Roundup article to my son's pediatrician. He does lots of research and publishes newsletters and pamphlets on various health issues for his practice's patients. I asked if they had a stance on the issue. I'll let you all know if he responds. I am stunned at the number of landscapers who live by this product all in the name of time savings. We are endeavoring to remove our front lawn grass without using the dastardly product. I don't want to kill my dogs or sicken the folks who walk by.
Water quality in Cleveland
I can't imagine buying bottled water - it is such a waste of resources. But I have noticed on and off, this winter, that the Cleveland tap water has been cloudy or tasted aweful. I read in the Plain Dealer the other day that some equipment malfunctioned, causing the bad taste, but that the water was safe to drink. I don't believe we are being told the whole story by the Cleveland Water Department. Another water quality concern I have in NEO is with lead exposure. In the November 2006 Salon was an article titled "Lead on tap: An alarming return of lead in drinking water is being ignored by the EPA and municipal officials" that reports many large, old, urban water systems are having very serious problems with lead contamination in pipes and so water due to a change in a chemical used to clean the water, and there have been cover-ups in cities that have resulted in many people being lead poisoned. I haven't heard anything about this one way or the other here but it goes to reason that Cleveland has the same problem. Here's how the situation is playing out in Washington, D.C.: "In Washington, tens of thousands of people unwittingly drank tap water contaminated with lead for several years; in a few cases, the tap water contained enough lead to be classified as a hazardous waste." Perhaps we should be drinking bottled water here after all... I definitely use a Brita filter on all water I use for drinking and even cooking! I'll investigate...
Disrupt IT
let us know what you find
when you have your tap water tested...