WATER IS LIFE FOR YOU AND YOUR BIRD
Article submitted by Bob Braunston
You are composed of 98% water and trace chemicals and carbon. It makes sense that you should exhibit care in replenishing your body’s water supply.
I live in a house with 15 birds, mostly cockatiels, a parrot and a budgie. Their owner is meticulous in her care for them. One Sunday, she noticed that several birds appeared ill and was alarmed enough to convince me to ferry her to the vet with three or four patients. Being a Sunday, few essential services were open, but we found a vet 45 minutes away that would see our patients. After exam and tests, it was determined that they all had a bacteria infection. It was NOT contagious, so over the next few days, all the birds were brought in for exam and tests as a precaution. They too were infected. Since this was not our normal vet, we did not get the usual price break given us for the fact that our birds are all rescues. So, almost $1000.00 later, we were treating birds for an infection not knowing how birds on one floor of the house could possibly infect birds on another floor. After research, we concluded that the only common denominator was the water supply.
Like many bird owners, we figured that bottled spring water was healthy for everyone. Spring water may be free of many of tap waters impurities, but it still contains all the micro-organisms that are responsible for illness. Our illness was not based on these, but on bacteria itself. The problem with a commercial water cooler, where they deliver 5 gallon jugs to your home, is that of STANDING water. The cooler operates by gravity and a pool of standing water collects at the basin. It is this water which is drawn every time you dispense it. Unfortunately, bacteria forms in standing water. Even with periodic cleaning of the dispenser with vinegar, bacteria will form in the water over time. The longer the water stands still, the greater the chance of hosting bacteria. Most bacteria are benign or helpful, but many are hurtful and even deadly. Birds are small and their systems are more sensitive to diseases.
What to do next? We started lugging gallon jugs of bottled water from the grocery store. This eliminated the standing water dilemma, but still precluded the micro-organism issues. Purified water would be best, but is not available in bulk. Purified water is purified using reverse osmosis, a process which turns water to steam and than back to water again. This process ensures that only water molecules can travel this path, so all micro-organisms are filtered. However, so are all the minerals, metals and other chemicals found in water. Some of these minerals are helpfully and even essential, so these minerals are added back to the water. The result is great water with good taste (Distilled water itself has no taste). You would soon go broke buying liters of this water to give your flock.
The solution came to me quite by accident via a fellow dog walking friend of mine. He introduced me to a water FILTER system he was using. This system is economical and removes all the bad stuff from water, leaving only the essential minerals. The ION water filter, which I STRONGLY ENDORSE, takes your tap water, removes all the bad micro-organisms, metals and chemicals in real time as it is dispensing the water. In other words, there is no STANDING reservoir of water, but rather the tap water is finely filtered as it is being drawn from the filter itself. If you choose cooled or heated water, this process also occurs in the dispensing cycle. There are several varieties of filter media available so we chose the one that uses silver impregnated particles in the carbon filter media to kill any bacteria which could grow in the filter media itself.
Total problem solution! We now have healthy water for the birds, ourselves and other pets. There is NO COST for the filter or installation. It is a lease; it is professionally installed and serviced, being sanitized twice a year. The cost competes with the cost of bottled water (and they will MATCH your current monthly bottled water bill), being about $36 to $40 monthly.
I STRONGLY ENDORSE THIS PRODUCT
My knowledge of healthy water started from my fish tank hobby and was needed to maintain health tanks. I filtered my water down to the micron level, but bacteria are so small, they can even pass through this millionth of a meter space.
In the article following this one, my good friend TIM BROWN, educates us about bottled water. There is a WEB link there. IF YOU GO TO THIS LINK, YOU WILL CONNECT TO A SITE THAT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR WATER CARE FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR BIRDS!
Thank you for your time, and I pray that you will have long and healthy life for yourself and the birds in your care.
The following article was submitted by Tim Brown, President of Stonybrook Water Company. Stonybrook was started as a direct response to the bottled water industry. To find out more about Stonybrook, visit: www.stonybrookwater.com
Bottled water is not a sin… But it is a choice.
Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders….that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness…. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles… cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge… We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.
Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it's reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle…. not just "Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I'm about to spend?"… but… "Does the value equal the impact I'm about to leave behind?"
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.
The largest bottled-water factory in North America is located on the outskirts of
Looking at the piles of water, you can have only one thought: Americans sure are thirsty.
Bottled water has become the indispensable prop in our lives and our culture. It starts the day in lunch boxes; it goes to every meeting, lecture hall, and soccer match; it's in our cubicles at work; in the cup holder of the treadmill at the gym; and it's rattling around half-finished on the floor of every minivan in
Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the
The really big water company in the
Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We….a generation raised on tap water and water fountains….drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we're raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We've come to pay good money….two or three or four times the cost of gasoline…for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes….
When we buy a bottle of water, what we're often buying is the bottle itself, as much as the water. We're buying the convenience--a bottle at the 7-Eleven isn't the same product as tap water, any more than a cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine on your kitchen counter…. And we're buying the artful story the water companies tell us about the water… where it comes from…. how healthy it is… what it says about us…. Surely among the choices we can make, bottled water isn't just good, it's positively virtuous.
Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence…. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The 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…. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the
A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture….. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health…. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water…modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer…. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't need…..when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation….it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is…. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest…..
In the town of
And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today…. while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in
The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says "from the islands of
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
That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity….Something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.
Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail.
San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles….so much a part of the mystique of the water itself….weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh…. dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed… with mineral water….before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino….it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter we buy….. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO2 carefully….it is extracted from super carbonated volcanic spring waters in Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.
Poland Spring may not have any oceans to traverse, but it still must be trucked hundreds of miles from Maine to markets and convenience stores across its territory in the northeast….it is 312 miles from the Hollis plant to midtown Manhattan…. Our desire for Poland Spring has outgrown the springs at Poland Spring's two
Coke and Pepsi add in a new step…. They put the local water through an energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process more potent than that used to turn seawater into drinking water…. The process of reverse osmosis wastes 4 to 5 gallons of water for every gallon of filtered water produced….They do it so marketing can brag about the purity, and to provide consistency: So a bottle of Aquafina in
There is one more item in bottled water's environmental ledger: the bottles themselves. The
