Hospitals in NSW asked to ditch bottled water in a desperate bid to cut costs

Hospitals asked to ditch bottled water for tap water to save costs.

HOSPITALS are being asked to ditch bottled water in a desperate bid to cut costs.

Nurses have been urged to serve tap water in jugs to save the state $1 million a year.

At least three million bottles are handed out to patients a year in a practice going on since 2007. But NSW Health is not sure why or how it started, as only half the state's hospitals use bottles - with the rest serving water in jugs.

With no official policy or reasons to justify the expensive practice, Health Minister Jillian Skinner has ordered all local health district chairs to look at banning the bottles.

It comes as government employees, including nurses, have been asked to rein in their costs to offset pay rises.

Mrs Skinner said she was concerned not only about the costs but the impact bottles have on the environment.

"If not, I see significant cost savings could be made in this area. I am particularly concerned that we're giving people the message that Sydney water is not safe to drink, and that we're responsible for discarding three million plastic bottles a year."

"I would like them to seriously consider whether they have a genuine clinical need to supply patients with bottled water," she said.

Some major hospitals such as Prince of Wales, Sydney Children's and Royal Hospital for Women at Randwick, don't use bottled water. These hospitals prefer nurses to hand out jugs to patients, and help those unable to hold cups.

One department source said there was anecdotal evidence that staff were using the bottles themselves.

Other hospitals use bottles because staff have complained of occupational health and safety issues over using jugs.

"There is inconsistent use of bottles across NSW, Some hospitals use bottles, some jugs," the source said. "You have to ask why some say it's an occupational risk to use jugs. There's also no clear or strong link between infection rates and use of water jugs."

In the lead-up to September's budget, all local health boards will have to provide the government with details as to why they want to continue using bottled water.

Mrs Skinner said she hoped boards would chose the more economical option.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/hospitals-in-nsw-asked-to-ditch-bottled-water-in-a-desperate-bid-to-cut-costs/story-e6frfkvr-1226082467501#ixzz1TjbSxW4X

DoNation: 'If 50 people give up bottled water, I will run a marathon'

Forget hounding your friends for cash – a new sponsorship site asks people for good deeds, not their money. By Alice-Azania Jarvis

from an article published in The Independent

To Hermione Taylor, it was a logical solution to a short-term problem. Due to embark on a sponsored cycle ride from London to Morocco, she found herself unwilling to nag friends for money. "It was the start of the credit crunch and a lot of people were students," she explains. "It felt like too much to ask." So she asked for something else: a promise. A promise to do a bit of good for the planet."We knew we wanted to do something for the environment – and, ultimately, that does not need money, it needs action."

The result was a list of 216 "pledges" from friends and family. They ranged from promising to eat less meat to washing clothes on a cool heat and, says Taylor, amounted to 16 tonnes of saved carbon (or, as she puts it "84 return flights to Morocco"). In the end, Taylor's grand cycle – which saw her sleep on beaches, stay with good samaritans and camp on hotel roofs – took 40 days. Its legacy has lasted much longer. Not only did she find that three-quarters of her sponsors continued their green actions after the allotted two months – but Taylor realised she had hit upon something potentially far bigger that a cycle race.

Having read for a masters in environmental technology at Imperial College London, she was only too familiar with the difficulty of encouraging green behaviour: "I'd focused on behavioural change and had looked at all sorts of so-called 'pledge schemes'. Talking to everyone when I got back, I realised that this ticked all the boxes for a good one."

Her idea was to take her pledge system and marry it with the online giving culture, pioneered by websites such as JustGiving, Virgin Money Giving and The Big Give. It's a field which, over the past decade, has expanded enormously – JustGiving, which handles some 85 per cent of all online donations – collected a staggering £188 million for charity in 2010 alone. The company has come in for criticism for its private, for-profit business model – unlike Virgin Money Giving, they deduct 5 per cent of every donation made and charities must pay £15 a month for membership – but Taylor points out the good they've done. "They've made giving so much easier – though I knew I'd have to be bit more innovative. For me, it was all about action, not donation." And so began a long year of planning, networking, researching and fund-raising, as Taylor attempted to turn her idea into a viable social enterprise. She was awarded two grants which paid for her cost of living. The rest she did alone – well, apart from the support of the social enterprise community and the help, since January, of an intern. Taylor had to turn her idea into a web-based reality, which meant acquiring knowledge of marketing, communications and design.

It's paid off. Earlier this month, thedonation.org.uk went live. Among those who've already signed up are Xavier Roeseler, who's hiking Spain's Camino Santiago, and Bojana Bajzalj and Will Usher, who plan to cycle from London to Ljubljana in 21 days. On signing up to the site, sponsors are given a choice of 20 actions that they can pledge to perform for a limited amount of time. Grouped into five categories – food, travel, energy, home and shopping – they range from giving up bottled water to installing solar panels. Make your selection, and you're met with a brief questionnaire to record your current habits and assess the change you will make. For every sponsor, an approximate carbon saving is worked out, allowing users to calculate their impact. "That's a big draw for people," explains Taylor of this. "The fact that there's a measurable benefit really makes a difference."

There is, of course, one potential flaw. Unlike websites where you pledge money, the DoNation can't hold everyone to account. It's perfectly possible – at least in theory – to pledge a bit of good behaviour and then default on it. This is something Taylor has thought long and hard about – and she believes she has a solution: "What we've done, essentially, is use a form of peer pressure. All the pledges are listed in public and, given that it's a friend or acquaintance that you are sponsoring, you're likely to be surrounded by people to police you."

It's with this in mind that I decide to give the system a go. Taylor counsels against opting for anything too ambitious – I don't have a bike, so cycling's out of the question. Equally, though, there's little point pledging something you already do. So no promise to take the stairs over the lift, or to wash on a low heat. Instead I decide to green my frequent trips to the kettle by promising to boil only the amount of water I'm going to use. And you know what? I've stuck to it (so far). It means waiting a fraction of the time that it would to boil a full kettle, too. Bonus! "A lot of people find that there are other positive repercussions," agrees Taylor. "It's not just about carbon."

Over the next year, she wants to expand the DoNation's capabilities, forming partnerships with companies, and expanding into a host of pledge-making activities. So far, most people who have signed up for the site have been doing some kind of sponsored race. Hopefully, the events will get more varied as time goes on – "We'd love to do a wedding list!" she says. Central to everything is a single simple message: behaving responsibly can be fun: "It can be a chore trying to be green. But we're making it social."

Massachusetts town undoes revolutionary bottled water ban ~ perhaps some historial metaphors are appropriate?

Massachusetts Town Undoes Revolutionary Bottled Water Ban

by Timothy Hurst

One year after making international headlines as the first town in the United States—and possibly the world—to ban the sale of bottled water, voters at the annual Town Meeting in Concord, Massachusetts this week rejected the water bottle ban, passing instead a proposal educating Concord citizens about the environmental impacts of water bottles.

The initial ban, passed in April 2010, was set to go into effect on January 1, 2011, but the state attorney general's office said it was written as a bylaw that could not be enforced. The measure voted on this week would have addressed that specific problem, but it would not have protected the town against probable lawsuits from industry groups.

"The cost of defending ourselves against such a lawsuit could be steep," Jeff Wieand, chairman of the Concord Board of Selectmen, told the Boston Globe. "It's possible we could get a law firm to defend us pro bono, but if that didn't happen it would be a significant expense for the town."

Known as the home of environmentalist Henry David Thoreau, it seemed fitting last spring when citizens of Concord approved the anti-establishment water bottle ban. But Concord is also known for being host to the first battle of the American Revolution. And ultimately it was not only the cost of likely litigation that won out over environmentalism, it was also the cause of liberty, or so said the bill's opponents.

Whichever historical metaphor one applies to this story, it is safe to say that the protagonists in neither would be very impressed with the (small d) democratic tendencies in Concord, population 17,000, as evidenced by voter turnout at Town Meeting. A total of 537 residents voted on the measure at the Town Meeting; 272 opposed the ban and 265 supported it.

But in all fairness to Concordians, the bill came up for consideration late in the evening, around 11 p.m., after many residents had already gone home, according to Jean Hill, who filed the petition to ban the water bottles. Hill says the battle she's fighting for the environment is not over yet.

“I’m coming back next year. I’m 83 and I’m tough. I don’t give up,” said Hill.

Maybe those historical metaphors are appropriate after all.

Reprinted with permission from Ecopolitology

a hilarious website and testament to 'news-speak': "Save the planet by consuming plastic"

 This is really hilarious: it is a website put up by the International Bottled Water Association to promote bottled water, going so far as to say that the industry is environmentally friendly. 

The video "every bottle counts" shows just how long a bow is being drawn here: the "green hero" drinks bottled water for its convenience, but then explains that she is willing to cart around a bag full of empties so she can recycle them at home. Smart thinking, right? At the end of her day she is carrying 6 little bottles in a trash bag, instead of her one, stylish, refillable bottle.

The website also boasts that 30% of bottles are recycled, but forgets to mention that this means 70% of bottles are in landfills. Then there are the other numbers - like the 1.3 billion pounds (that 1300000000 pounds) of plastic resin SAVED since 2001 by making the plastic water bottles lighter. Hmmm...now what does that really mean? That the amount of resin used was much, much more than that - try at least 3 times as much - virtually all of it pointless except for profit, and 70% of it now in landfills or the ocean.

This is a real testament to 'news-speak'. Save the planet by consuming plastic? One more step along this path and we could see someone suggesting that we sequester carbon by turning it into plastic and burying it in landfills. Maybe the bottled water industry could get some carbon credits for that?

Calculate how much your water habit costs~

The real cost of bottled water

from an article in 'The Age' 2007

AUSTRALIA'S love affair with bottled water is costing the planet 314,000 barrels of oil a year.

That's how much of one of the world's most precious resources it takes to package, ship and refrigerate a product that is already piped to every single suburban premises for next to nothing, according toSunday Age calculations.

"It's one of the greatest cons ever pulled," says Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan. "It's just lunacy, there is no other word for it. We are squandering our oil resources."

Oil is not the only precious resource being squandered by consumers, with bottled water 2500 times more expensive than the tap variety.

"Drinking water in Melbourne or Sydney costs around $1.20 a tonne," says Mr Kiernan. "Australian bottled water costs around $3000 a tonne. And Italian bottled water? About $9000 a tonne.

"It's more expensive than petrol — if you could turn petrol into water you could make money."

According to the Australasian Bottled Water Institute, we spend about $385 million a year on bottled water.

Peter Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute, which provides independent research and policy analysis on issues of development and the environment, recently calculated that demand for bottled water in the United States was burning up at least 17 million barrels of oil a year.

"And that's just the energy required to make the plastic resin and make it into bottles. It doesn't include the energy needed to get the bottled water to your local store," Dr Gleick says.

He estimates that the total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a quarter of a plastic bottle with crude oil.

"There are some situations where it might be OK to buy a bottle of water, but I don't think consumers are fully aware of the economic and environmental impact of what it takes to produce a bottle of water," he says.

"Especially when pure, clean drinking water is available, literally, on tap."

With no chlorine added to kill bacteria and no fluoride to strengthen teeth, bottled water can't even be considered better for you.

Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is urging consumers to think more carefully about their purchases.

"We must be thoughtful all of the time," Mr Turnbull says. "And we must encourage people to think about the way they use all our resources."

Mr Turnbull says the waste of resources used to get bottled water to the shop also highlights the need for a carbon price.

Uni weighs bottled water ban

 from The Canberra Times

BY PHILLIP THOMSON

28 Oct, 2010 09:31 AM

The University of Canberra is considering banning the sale of bottled water, which could be a $100,000 loss for campus retailers.

The move had some of the university's 8000-plus students worried the Bundanoon-style ban to become Australia's first bottled water-free campus may increase the sale of unhealthier soft drinks.

University management has already decided to install cold water bubblers and will now consider the ban suggested by a group of students. The bubblers will allow students to fill up re-usable plastic bottles as opposed to buying fresh ones.

The ban is a continuation of the ACT's war on environmentally unfriendly plastic, with the territory Government expected today to succeed in the Legislative Assembly to ban plastic shopping bags.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 plastic bottles of water are sold at the University of Canberra every year. The University of Canberra Student Association broadly supports the ban but has reservations about some of the details.
For more on this story, including comments that revellers at university festivals should still be able to buy water, and that the move may lead to the sale of more soft drinks, see the print edition of today's Canberra Times.

Why Would You Choose Bottled Water?

from an article at: Green Energy News

Nowadays, most people probably agree that we need to drink plenty of water in order to stay healthy, avoid dehydration and to function efficiently. The exact quantity of water that you need will vary according to your body mass and size, climatic conditions you find yourself in and the level of physical activity in which you are engaged. However, most medical authorities currently suggest that your daily water intake should be between six and eight large glasses of water.
This perfectly sound medical advice has been one factor used in the advertising campaigns of bottled water suppliers to very effectively market their product. The bottled water market is relatively new – but it is very large. Consumer demand for bottled water more than doubled between 1997 and 2005, and over 200 billion bottles of water are sold worldwide per annum.
That’s a massive amount of empty bottles being thrown away. Some – a little less than a quarter of the total according to current statistics – are recycled. The rest end up as landfill. The environmental consequences are significant. If all of those empty bottles were aligned end to end, they would span a distance covered long enough to get to the moon and back – 56 times!
The amount of carbon emissions involved, both in the production of the bottles and the transportation of the finished product, is also worthy of consideration. It’s an amazing fact that the production of the bottles uses three times as much water as the bottles contain when they are shipped.
Bottled water is, simply put, an environmental disaster. Of course, it’s not out of the question that you may be more worried about your own health than that of the planet – which may well be understandable in many cases. The problem with this logic is that there is absolutely no evidence that bottled water is better for your health than common or garden tap water.
Tap water in North America and Europe is perfectly safe to drink and is subject to stringent checks. Some bottled water has been found to contain traces of uranium and estrogen chemicals. Some of the chemicals found in bottled water are as a result of “leeching” from the plastic (PET) bottles. It’s also established that many bottled waters contain, along with other minerals, salt – which is not very good for your blood pressure.
The only reason you might conceivably be tempted to use bottled water would be the taste. However, in blind taste tests most consumers are unable to tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. Of course, if your house is in a hard water area, or if you just don’t like the taste of your tap water (perhaps due to chlorine which is often used by the water supplier to kill bacteria) you may wish to evluate other alternatives.
You could consider using a home filtration system – which will be better for the environment, better for your health and very much cheaper than bottled water. You can install whole house filtration systems, under sink filters. All of these solutions will remove contaminants, enhance taste and reduce water hardness in a manner which is environmentally friendly.

More Reasons to Stop Drinking Bottled Water

 from Peter Gleick at fast company

World renowned water expert Peter Gleick has a new book--released in May 2010--outlining the scientific evidence that bottled water use in the U.S. has become unsustainable. The book is called Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind our Obsession with Bottled Water.

Peter Gleick: Twenty five years ago in the United States, each American probably drank a gallon of bottled water a year, on average. Today it's up to 30.

Gleick told EarthSky that--every second in the U.S.--we consume about 1,000 bottles of water. He spoke of the tremendous amount of fuel burned in order to make and transport these bottles, most of which ultimately end up in a landfill.

We did an estimate at the Pacific Institute that if you calculate the energy requirement of making all of the bottles that are consumed the United States in a year, it's on the order of 17 or 18 million barrels of oil equivalent.

He said there are lesser known environmental impacts of bottled water--such as groundwater depletion. He talked about visiting a bottled water facility in California.

It turns out that the source of that water is a desert spring up in a remote canyon in the deserts near Palm Springs. The more water you take out, the less water you have for flow in the springs, the less the rare desert ecosystems have to survive. And that sort of problem is being repeated around the country.

And around the world. He said the global consumption of bottled water is about 40 billion gallons a year. But that's not his biggest concern.

Probably my biggest concern is that I believe very strongly that water is a human right. There are a billion people worldwide today that don't have access to safe tap water. The solution is not bottled water. The solution is developing high quality public water systems that can provide inexpensive water for everyone.

He spoke of public versus private control of water systems.

And it does raise this question about public versus private control. I believe that water ought to be available to the public. We have an incredible tap water system that's been built and operated and owned by the public. I think that's a good model for the rest of the world, but we don't see it yet.

His scientific opinion is that tap water in the United States is, generally, excellent. In fact, he added, about 45% of bottled water is filtered municipal water.

American tap water is carefully monitored. It's carefully regulated. But I'd be the first to argue that it ought to be better. There are places in the United States where people don't have safe drinking water, mostly in rural areas where wells aren't monitored by municipal agencies or federal agencies.

He said our Safe Drinking Water Act is outdated, and that our water-treatment technology needs to be upgraded. But all of those things can be done at a far lower cost than providing bottled water, which often isn't monitored as carefully as our tap water. The first step, he believes, is to maintain and expand a state-of-the-art tap water system.

It's the cheapest, most equitable, most environmentally sound solution. I think if we did that--if we restored confidence in our tap water--bottled water sales would drop.

Written by Beth Lebwohl 
Photo Credit: ricardo/zone41.net

Peter Gleick is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in California, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow , and an internationally recognized water expert. His research and writing address the critical connections between water and human health, the hydrologic impacts of climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization, and international conflicts over water resources. He's a blogger for the Huffington Post, and was named "Visionary: A Catalyst for an Enlightened Future" by the Los Angeles Times in early 2010.

Bottled Water is a Symbol of Modern Day Consumerism. A Symbol we Don’t Need.

from an article in uncluttered white spaces

Bottled water is simply an indulgence for western culture, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. The USA alone are moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks. Picture this, that is the same as 37,800 full size trucks delivering water a week. Water is heavy, so heavy in fact that you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave quite a lot of empty space. Yep, ouch!

Fair to say, that one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. So our global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. Lets repeat that… “NOT ONE OF WHICH WE NEED!

A chilled plastic bottle of water in a shop fridge is the perfect symbol of modern day consumerism and the laziness for western culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, ignorance for health related issues and environmental problems.

OK, it’s just a bottle of water, I can hear you saying so what, this has no impact compared with the indulgence of driving a bullet proof Hummer. A whole industry has been created to supply us, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Brazilians, Kiwi’s… any nation for that matter with safe drinking water something that we dont actually need. And we keep on buying it.

We buy bottled water because we think it’s healthy. Which it is, of course: Every kid who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a bottled of Coke is in-arguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer, than tap water. Its the same thing. Its just water. Consider this… If the water we use at home cost what the cheapest bottled water costs us, then our monthly water bills would run around $9,000.

Considering half the price of a typical $2.00 bottle goes to the retailer. Around one third goes to the distributor and transport. Another 15 to 20 cents is the cost of the water itself, the bottle and the cap.We are just lining pockets. Chris Guillebeau wrote an article that saving $2 a day will take you anywhere you want to go in the world within 2 years. Most people I know spend a lot more than that on bottled water and complain they cant afford to go anywhere for their holidays. Maybe they should subscribe to Chris’s insanely good blog.

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Take a trip to the source of that water, and you realize just how amazing that promise is. From New York  it is an 18-hour plane ride west (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway. Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it. What a joke.

We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.

Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice. Once you understand the process and resource used to create and deliver the bottle of water, ask yourself this question “Does the $2 I am about to spend equal the impact I’m about to leave behind?” Especially when your kitchen sink is available every morning ready to refresh.

Simply asking the question takes the carelessness out of the transaction. And once you understand where the water comes from, and how it got here, it’s hard to look at that bottle in the same way again.

School bans plastic water bottles

Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College in Sydney's north has banned the sale of plastic water bottles.

from an article at ABC North Coast

The canteen will no longer stock plastic water bottles and the school also spent $7,500 installing water bubblers for the students to use instead.

The initiative will be launched today by sailor activist David de Rothschild who this week completed a voyage across the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki, a boat made from recycled bottles.

Year 12 student Claudia Saunders says she hopes the ban will do more than reduce the school's consumption of plastic bottles.

"It's also about promoting it to Monte girls and getting the awareness out there how unnecessary these bottles are and the damage they can cause to the environment, both in their production and then in their disposal," she said.

The school's effort has been hailed as a model that can be rolled out across the country.

Jon Dee, founder of the environment group Do Something, says the campaign will significantly reduce the amount of plastic waste at the school.

"We'll have 1,100 girls at this school who won't have bottled water," he said.

"Now if they can do that at Monte Sant' Angelo there's no reason why other schools couldn't follow this example.

"It will set a great environmental role model for the kids but it will also show kids you can help the environment and you can save money at the same time."