Florida officials are warning home owners against a new outbreak of the old familiar "free home water test" scam.

A Carlsbad, California man has invented a unique recycling system that could save homeowners water and thousands of dollars in water bills.

The US Postal Service has started a mail-back program for veterans to keep outdated prescription drugs out of the water supply. 

The town of Bernalillo paid at least $4.9 million to build an arsenic filtration systems which didn't work.  

Twenty million people in SW China do not have access to water as the region is experiencing the worst drought in a century.

Few think of heat as a water contaminant, but heated water emitted from industrial sites significantly degrades water quality.

Penn State University is studying the effects of gas drilling on the water quality of private wells.  We will still be studying this when we're all crawling through a waterless desert salivating and begging for oil, like the pitiful wretch in the picture. Natural gas exploration practices are ruining our groundwater, while we stand politely aside and do nothing.

"Humanity's plastic footprint is probably more dangerous than its carbon footprint."  A second massive plastic floating garbage heap has been identified in the North Atlantic.

"A Redneck from Michigan," as she calls herself, has single-handedly shut down a major polluting factory farm and brought heavy fines upon others.

Though drowning in debt, the University of California is still spending millions on bottled water for its campus offices.

Nestle, trying to clean up its sleazy image, is banking on the decline in quality of public water supplies to boost its bottled water sales. 

Prickly pear cactus, it was learned, has great potential as a water treatment device.

Boeing was fined $500,000 for storm water runoff violations.

ANSI/NSF: What's it all about?

by Gene Franks

A standard question about water treatment products these days is to ask if they are "NSF certified." For our products, the answer isn't simple. Some of them carry full third-party certification, some have certification on some of their components, and some aren't certified at all. And some have certification from third parties that have no affiliation with NSF.

"Is your product NSF certified?"  implies--and most take it to mean--that there is some federally sponsored (N for national) certifying agency, probably a branch of the EPA, that  "certifies" products the way that USDA puts its stamp on the rump of a dead pig making it an officially edible ham.  That isn't the way it works at all.

Why  would KX Industries not just have its PB1 cartridge NSF/ANSI certified?  Mainly, the cost.  It costs literally tens of thousands of dollars to obtain and maintain NSF/ANSI certification.  Many manufacturers use certification as a selling tool.  They spend  large amounts maintaining product certification and they advertise their products accordingly, usually with the implication that uncertified products are not to be trusted.  Other manufacturers--KX Industries, for example, as well as many other highly respected manufacturers--rely more on their own reputation and experience than third-party certification to sell their products.  The lower price they are able to charge because of the the money saved on certification gives an added selling advantage. 

Certification is important.  It gives the customer confidence that the product meets a certain standard--either in materials it is made from or in its performance.  But if you limit yourself to products that are NSF/ANSI certified you may be depriving yourself of some really superior products as well as spending more than you need to. 

"Let the buyer beware" is a two-edged sword.  It isn't good to buy an inferior product, but no one likes the idea of paying an extra $20 for a filter cartridge to support the manufacturer's advertising campaign.

Drugs in Water. Where They Come From.

Below is a truncated cut from the April 11 issue of Dr. William Campbell Douglas's popular online newsletter.  In it Dr. Douglas reiterates the information released earlier this month about the severe pharmaceuticals contamination of water by the public use of medicated bath products.  

How creams and lotions contribute to water pollution

If you're slathering on topical creams, antibiotic ointments, medicated patches and hormone lotions, you're not just marinating yourself in unnecessary meds -- you're sharing them with your friends and neighbors as well.

An alarming new study presented at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting shows that when you bathe, these drugs head right into the water table, where they make a beeline for taps all over town.

Thanks, pal. Just what the rest of us a need -- an extra dose of YOUR meds.

But hey, it's not just you. We're all drinking each other's drugs. Every prescription pill you swallow eventually comes out the other end, where it gets flushed down the drain. That's bad enough -- but at least those meds are diluted by their trip through the body.

All those creamy, gooey lotions, on the other hand, are still full-strength drugs when you wash them off.

And forget water treatment plants -- trusting them to keep chemicals out of your tap water would be like trusting the French to keep out the Germans.

I've been warning of tainted water for years. Every day, millions of Americans are exposed to some of the worst drugs, chemicals and toxins imaginable -- all pouring out of your supposedly safe tap water.

Everything from sex-change hormones to rocket fuel has been found in U.S. drinking water from coast to coast -- in big cities and small towns alike. Some of these poisons enter as human waste, like those drugs I just mentioned... but others are a byproduct of corporate greed as American industry uses your waterways as its own private dumping grounds. 

And of course, plenty of other toxic additives are put in on purpose -- fluoride, chlorine and a few extras they haven't copped to yet. Feminizing, sissy-making hormone drugs keep turning up in our water, making men impotent and weak -- and I refuse to believe it's an accident

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Add it all up, and we've got some of the world's most polluted water -- and there's little you can do to protect yourself from it. Don't waste your money with supermarket water filters -- get yourself a reverse-osmosis filter and install where the water enters your home.

And if you want the shocking truth about what tainted water can do to a community... keep reading!

Tainted water leads to cancer spike

I've been warning you for years about tainted water -- and now, one community is paying the ultimate price.

A cancer cluster has been uncovered in the Chicago suburb of Crestwood... where residents were unwittingly drinking contaminated water for decades.

The Illinois Department of Public Health says this small village of 11,000 people is suffering from elevated rates of gastrointestinal, kidney, lung and colorectal cancers. And while you can lead a bureaucrat to tainted water, you can't make him think -- because the report actually stops short of blaming the water itself.

But everyone knows what really happened in Crestwood.

The contamination was first exposed in 1985, when state EPA tests found traces of a chemical used in dry cleaning in the local well water. They alerted the village, which said it would stop using the dirty water.

That's when this story gets really, truly frightening... because the village then inexplicably continued to use this undrinkably bad sludgewater for 20 more years. Even worse: They stopped testing it!

That's right -- not a single follow-up test over 20 years. And if that's the case in a place like Crestwood, where they KNEW the water was contaminated, what chance does your town have?

Answer: None.

This toxic tale tells you everything you need to know about the inability of public officials to test and regulate the water supply.

It's sad -- but expect to hear about more Crestwoods. Water contamination is the next big crisis ready to explode, and your town may be next. Truth is, you're better off sucking up a mud puddle in a Third World country than sipping a glass of typical American H20.

Contaminant of the Month: Radium

The natural metal Radium is a known human carcinogen. Radium exists naturally in rocks and ores and it is also refined from uranium ore. It is measured in pico curies (pCi), a measure of radioactivity.

Removal of Radium can be accomplished by cation exchange (a water softener) and by reverse osmosis, which removes 95 to 98%. Distillation also removes radium.

For more information about radium, visit the Occasional's Water Treatment Issues page.

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