The list of hazards: The effect on the capital’s complacent intelligentsia was akin to Moses’ descent from Sinai. In this eco-correct core of the national capital, that was no small feat. He made no bones about the hazards:

• infections by virulent pathogens, the ones we know about and a lot of new ones;

• possible contamination with oestrogen, which was almost impossible to break down, and antibiotic drugs; and

• ultimately the worst-case scenario, the possible catastrophic effects of system failure.

Indicator bacteria take time to be detected: "If coliforms (for example, E. coli) are present in the treated water, this implies faecal contamination and thus a failure of the system," he says. "Around the world, numerous outbreaks with water contaminated with viruses and cryptosporidiosis have occurred despite low or zero coliform counts. These indicator bacteria take one or two days to grow and identify." Because of this factor, Collignon was also worried there was no plan in the ACT for storage of the treated sewage water in aquifers, as in California.

‘Contaminated water would be in dams already’: "Presumably the water will be pumped directly back into our dams after treatment," he says. "This will mean that even when we detect with our treatment system, there will be little we can do about it because the contaminated water will already be in our dams."

The Australian, 21/7/2007, p. 29

This bottled water issue brings to light the apparent deceptive practices of some of the largest suppliers of bottled water products. By avoiding the honest labeling of the source of their water while relying on snow-capped mountain imagery, these companies quietly mislead consumers into thinking their water products are from a pristine, natural source such as a mountain spring.

CAI pressures PepsiCo to tell the truth

PepsiCo only agreed to tell the truth on their bottled water labels after being pressured by Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a non-profit organization that helps protect consumers from corporate abuse. See their website at http://www.stopcorporateabusenow.org

CAI rallied consumers from around the world to complain to PepsiCo about the current labeling of Aquafina, and thousands of consumers slammed PepsiCo’s phone lines so hard that the company was forced to shut down call center operations. CAI told NewsTarget that within 30 minutes after the call-to-action announcement went live, PepsiCo’s consumer phone lines were no longer being answered and would not allow callers to leave voice mails. Pepsi executives reportedly held an emergency meeting and made a decision to add the phrase, "Public water source" to Aquafina labels.

Reluctantly admitting a small part of the truth

Even then, the phrase "public water source" isn’t very descriptive. To some people, the phrase simply implies that Aquafina is itself a public water source. It’s not the same as admitting, "Aquafina comes from tap water," which would be a far more honest way to label the product. But PepsiCo seems to have no interest in advertising the source of their Aquafina product, and my guess is that the "public water source" text on the label will be really small and difficult to read. It’s much like the labeling of side effects of prescription drugs: They bury the bad news somewhere that most consumers won’t ever look.

Aquafina is currently the top-selling bottled water brand in the United States. According to CAI, 4 out of 5 consumers now drink bottled water, and 1 out of 5 drink it as their sole water source! (Gee, that’s a lot of plastic going to landfill, too…)

The bottles used to package bottled water are almost always made from plastics containing bisphenol-A (BPA), a carcinogenic chemical that often leaches into the water and gets swallowed by consumers. Click here to read our articles on BPA, a chemical widely believed to contribute to certain cancers. This contamination factor, however, is true for all products stored in plastic bottles, not merely water. Sports drinks, sodas, fruit drinks and even "healthy" smoothie drinks packaged in plastic all share a common risk of BPA contamination.

Bottled water vs. public water infrastructure

The widespread shift towards bottled water products is increasingly causing consumers to lose faith in public water infrastructure, which ultimately leads to public reluctance to support investment in public water supplies. This concerns many cities who are worried that a lack of public support will cause funding for water infrastructure to erode.

These people tend to describe treated municipal water as remarkably pristine and safe for human consumption. In my opinion, however, tap water should never be swallowed without filtering it, since tap water contains scary levels of toxic chemicals such as chlorine and fluoride, a dangerous water additive chemical often contaminated with arsenic. (Click here to learn the truth about water fluoridation.)

So I wouldn’t drink from the public water supply in the first place, but neither do I rely on bottled water. I use a water filtration system to clean tap water before I drink it. (Coincidentally, this is similar to what PepsiCo does when creating Aquafina water, except PepsiCo uses plastic bottles, where I only drink out of glass or stainless steel.)

You can get clean public water in places like Hawaii, Oregon and anywhere that’s close to the mountains, but most folks in first world nations are getting tap water that’s far from pristine. The public water infrastructure in the U.S. may be among the best in the world, but that’s not saying much. I won’t even shower in U.S. public water without using a chlorine filter on my shower head. (Recommended brand: Aquasana at http://www.aquasana.com )

My view on PepsiCo

Since this story has much to do with PepsiCo, I thought I would offer my personal opinion on this corporation. In my opinion, PepsiCo is a highly destructive corporation that is partially responsible for obesity, diabetes, depression and bone disorders among hundreds of millions of people around the world. Through its aggressive (and deceptive, in my opinion) marketing campaigns, lack of corporate ethics and ready willingness to exploit human beings for profit, PepsiCo has risen to be one of the most financially profitable yet ethically bankrupt organizations on the planet.

If PepsiCo were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, humanity would be healthier the very next day. PepsiCo’s brands include: (followed by my opinion statement about that particular brand)

Frito-Lay: Dangerous junk food that contributes to obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression and other serious diseases.

Pepsi-Cola: Toxic beverages that destroy bone mineral density and poison consumers with chemical sweeteners in diet drinks.

Gatorade: Crap sports drinks that contain artificial colors made from petrochemical derivatives.

Tropicana: A low-end fruit juice brand engaged in deceptive labeling for many of its products.

Quaker: This is perhaps the only tolerable brand in the PepsiCo portfolio. Oatmeal is essentially good for you, although instant oats and all the sugars found in many oatmeal products make it a rather high-glycemic food that’s not recommended for most people (especially diabetics or obese people).

Put it all together and you have a collection of some of the least healthy foods and beverages on the market today. When future historians examine today’s epidemics of obesity and diabetes, they will no doubt scrutinize the role of companies like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, both of which are partly to blame for modern disease epidemics. Both companies, by the way, continue to engage in routine marketing of junk foods and sodas to children.

Pepsico is a corporation that won’t even list the acrylamide content in their fried foods. Nor will it publicly admit that high-fructose corn syrup has any link whatsoever to obesity. PepsiCo, in my opinion, is a corporation living in a deviant reality, unwilling to take responsibility for its role in poisoning the population through its toxic food and beverage products.

That’s my personal opinion of PepsiCo, its brands and its products. Personally, I wouldn’t buy anything made by PepsiCo. I have no desire to financially reward this company by purchasing its products. If anything, we should all be boycotting PepsiCo products (and Coca-Cola, for that matter) and getting our water from somewhere else.

When traveling through airports, of course, I am sometimes forced to buy Aquafina or Dasani, as nothing else is available. This is the only time you’ll ever see me drinking out of a PepsiCo bottle.

If I were in charge around here, I would immediately ban all advertising of junk foods, sodas, snack foods, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and other harmful substances. It’s the only sane thing to do if we care about the future of our children. Of course, such advertising bans will never actually take place because corporations run the government. See my CounterThink Cartoon, Government of the People for a humorous depiction of this current state of affairs.

And as far as Pepsi’s water brand goes, I think it should be renamed to AquaFib.

 

 

Ear-splitting military sonar is needlessly threatening whales and other marine mammals throughout the world’s oceans. Yet the U.S. Navy has resisted legal requirements to put safeguards in place during peacetime testing and training to protect marine life. In response to this dangerous breach of US bedrock environmental laws, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is waging a campaign of courtroom action and public pressure to compel the Navy to restrict its use of deadly sonar.

High-intensity sonar blasts whales with noise billions of times more intense than levels known to disturb them and can cause their internal organs to hemorrhage. Scientists have linked the use of mid-frequency military sonar to hundreds of whale strandings and deaths around the world, in areas such as North Carolina, the Bahamas, Greece, the Canary Islands and Japan. Such sonar can also interfere with a whale’s hearing, affecting its ability to navigate, avoid predators, find food, care for its young and, ultimately, survive.

In July 2006, NRDC won a victory restricting the Navy’s use of whale-killing, mid-frequency sonar during a massive international military exercise in the waters off Hawaii. After a court order temporarily blocking the Navy’s use of sonar during the month-long exercise was secured, the Navy agreed to create a sonar-free buffer zone around the newly established Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, significantly increase the monitoring of marine mammals during sonar drills, and implement other protective measures.

During the latest court battle, the Secretary of Defense declared the Navy exempt from the Marine Mammal Protection Act for six months. This unprecedented exemption releases the Navy from the mandates of this all-important law, and BioGems Defenders are now flooding the Navy with protests for putting itself above our nation’s law.

For more information and how to take action, go to NRDC web site. 

  Watch video: Lethal Sounds narrated by Pierce Brosnan

 

by Don Henry, The Canberra Times

WANTED: Major political party prepared to stand up for Tasmania’s world-renowned old-growth forests.

Last week, politicians returned their attention to forests.

We had Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull telling a conference in Sydney about the Federal Government’s commitment to protecting forests, stopping deforestation and encouraging sustainable forestry as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

But the forests Turnbull was referring to are not in Australia; they’re in South-East Asia.

Then we had Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd standing in a Tasmanian timber yard and "locking in" Labor’s support behind the Federal Government’s Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement an arrangement that leaves many tens of thousands of hectares of high conservation value forest on public land open to logging.

Australians are left wondering if both major political parties have deserted Tasmania’s spectacular and ecologically important old-growth forests.

The Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement, announced by Prime Minister John Howard in May 2005, committed to protect about 135,000ha of forest on public land.

The Tarkine was promised strong protection (consistent with its World Heritage status) and the Styx was partially protected.

But other areas vital for tourism and the environment, like the Florentine, the Weld and the Blue Tier, and the Western Tiers remain open to logging under the current agreement.

Rudd’s announcement, far from securing the future of Tasmania’s forest industry, will entrench division and uncertainty.

In 2004 the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society, in conjunction with other environment groups, put forward a structural reform and development package called Protecting Forests, Growing Jobs. The package proposed a five-year transition to help Tasmania’s timber industry get out of high conservation value and old-growth forests and move to value-adding operations based largely on the available plantations.

Federal Government investment of $50million a year for five years would deliver up to 1190 jobs, more than offsetting the 320 jobs assessed to be directly impacted by forest conservation initiatives.

The problems surrounding forestry in Tasmania have not been addressed in the Community Forest Agreement. The Protecting Forests, Growing Jobs proposal is still relevant.

Adding to the existing, ongoing problems of unsustainable industry practices is the Gunns pulp mill proposal for the Tamar Valley in the north-east of the state.

Pulp mills do not have to be environmentally damaging. Visy’s Tumut pulp mill, which the foundation has not opposed, uses plantation feedstock and non-chlorine processes and employs hundreds of people.

In contrast, Gunns plans to build a mill that will be fed by native forests and run with chlorine-based technology. In the event of a malfunction, toxins could be released to the air and water.

The Australian Medical Association has raised concerns about the health impact increased air pollution from the mill would have on families in Launceston and the wider Tamar Valley a "closed" valley that tends to trap wood smoke from fire places and any industrial emissions.

Scallop fishermen fear their industry could go under if the mill is allowed to discharge toxic effluent into Bass Strait, as is proposed. Grape growers and the tourism industry have also voiced concerns.

Much of the community anger has centred around Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon’s decision in March to introduce a controversial fast-track assessment process for the mill.

After throwing out the Resource Planning and Development Commission’s assessment process, the state Government engaged consultants ITS Global to conduct a review of the social and economic benefits of the proposed pulp mill.

The Australian Conservation Foundation is familiar with ITS Global through the consulting firm’s work in Papua New Guinea. Last year it helped controversial Malaysian timber giant Rimbunan Hijau run a public relations campaign to justify the company’s notorious logging operations in PNG.

The foundation’s 2006 report Bulldozing Progress documents how Rimbunan Hijau’s operations in PNG have been repeatedly linked to serious human rights abuses, and environmental damage, the very activities Turnbull is now trying to address. In the interests of providing maximum protection for the Tasmanian environment, the state Government should have stuck with the Resource Planning and Development Commission process.

The Tasmanian Parliament is expected to vote on the mill proposal at the end of August. But questions remain for federal politicians on both sides of the fence.

Government and Opposition should commit to the highest possible environmental assessment standard for the proposed mill.

The ALP should honour its April national conference commitment to "further protection of identified Tasmanian high conservation value, old-growth forests, rainforests and other ecosystems".

And the Federal Government should tell Australians whether its laudable commitment to reducing deforestation and encouraging sustainable forestry extends to Tasmania’s magnificent old growth forests.

Don Henry is executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation

The rule has changed 

 

Making drinking water out of sea water could lead to the destruction of prized coastal areas, according to a new global report by WWF.

The growing trend in some of the world’s driest countries, like Australia, to build desalination plants as a solution to water shortages, comes under scrutiny in the report released in June.

Potential environmental impacts – like a build up of brine, increased greenhouse gas emissions, degradation of coastal areas, and reduced emphasis on conservation of rivers and wetlands – are identified by WWF as major problems resulting from desalination plants.

To read the full report, click here and you will be taken to the World Wildlife Fund ‘s web site.