It’s that time of year again.  Water is running freely down driveways and along gutters in my neighborhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  We’re in the middle of the high desert but my neighbors, like millions of Americans across the country, are indulging in one of the traditional pleasures of summer-washing the car.

Shirts off, hoses opened wide.  Water and foaming agents run down the street and will eventually end up in our city storm drainage system, then back into the Rio Grande for cities downriver to drink.

On average people use 100 gallons or more of water to wash their car, depending on the type of hose and how much time they spend.  Hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country are using thousands of gallons of water each summer to wash their cars.

But there are simple alternatives that leave your car just as clean and shiny.  For example there is a waterless carwash formula that uses the same technology used to car for race cars.  The formula includes coconut and soy, organic soy solvent, water-soluble polymer, and no fragrances, dyes or phosphates.  It’s better for the environment and you use no water.

Just like many threats to our environment, there are simple, affordable alternatives.  It is just a question of clearly establishing our priorities and breaking old habits.

To order your waterless carwash or other water-saving products, visit the products section of our site and become part of the solution!

Yet there is one source of contaminants that I haven’t been able to do much about:  Our drinking water.

Sure, we have a PuR filter to help filter the water from our tap and I read the water quality reports from my local water authority.  But the local water authority is only required to report on contaminants regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-and the EPA only regulates a small percentage of the known pollutants found in America’s drinking water.

I recently came across an article in the Washington Post that preceeded the EPA’s Oct 2008 decision not to regulate perchlorate, a dangerous chemical shown to affect the thyroid and thus impair many hormone-related functions such as fertility, growth, and brain development.

According to Robert Zoeller, a University of Massachusetts professor who specializes in thyroid hormone and brain development and was quoted in the article, “[the EPA has] distorted the science to such an extent that they can justify not regulating” perchlorate.  “Infants and children will continue to be damaged, and that damage is significant.”

Zoeller said scientific studies have shown that a small reduction in thyroid function in infants can translate into a loss of IQ and an increase in behavioral and perception problems. “It’s absolutely irreversible,” he said. “Even small changes in thyroid functions early on have impacts on functioning through high school and even into people’s 20s.”

A reference to those studies in the EPA’s proposal was deleted by White House Office of Management and Budget officials, reportedly due in part to pressure from the Pentagon.

The original EPA document also found that bottle-fed infants would be exposed to more than five times the level the National Academy of Sciences deemed safe — 700 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day — if parents mix formula with drinking water containing perchlorate levels of 15 ppb.  Breast-fed infants whose mothers are exposed to perchlorate would ingest even higher levels of the chemical, as perchlorate becomes highly concentrated in breastmilk at levels exponentially greater than other means of excretion.

The more I researched perchlorate, the more outraged I became.  The city of Albuquerque, where we live, is one of many cities across the country with known detection of perchlorate in the city water.  We and millions of other people across the country are exposed to unacceptable levels of perchlorate, which affect our health in a myriad of ways and disproportionately harm infants, children, and women of reproductive age.

What is perchlorate?

According to the American Water Works Association, perchlorate is both a naturally occurring and man-made ion used to form a variety of salts. The primary use of perchlorate today is as an oxidizer in solid rocket fuel and other propellants and to a lesser extent, in fireworks, explosives, and air-bag inflators.  It is also used in some municipal waste treatment plants around the country.

Why is perchlorate harmful?

Perchlorate interferes with iodide uptake into the thyroid gland, and the thyroid is a central control point for a variety of hormonal responses.  In fetuses, infants, and young children, thyroid hormones are critical for normal growth and development.  In adults, the thyroid helps to regulate metabolism and fertility.  Iodide deficiency in women (such as that caused by perchlorate exposure) can decrease levels of fertility, increase miscarriage rates, and lead to more serious health risks such as goiter and thyroid cancer.  Women with iodide deficiency who are lucky enough to become pregnant have a high risk of birthing babies with developmental problems-including behavioral disorders, delayed development and decreased learning capability.

“[the EPA has] distorted the science to such an extent that they can justify not regulating” perchlorate.  “Infants and children will continue to be damaged, and that damage is significant.”

Robert Zoeller
University of Massachusetts

Nursing women can excrete perchlorate in breastmilk in disproportionately high quantities, resulting in infant consumption of perchlorate at levels that far exceed the recommended limit per body weight. Kirk et al. (2005) analyzed 36 breast milk samples from 18 States (CA, CT, FL, GA, HI, MD, ME, MI, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NM, NY, TX, VA, WA, WV) and found perchlorate concentrations in all samples ranging from 1.4 to 92.2 μg/L.  For more specifics on the health effects of perchlorate (per the EPA’s highly edited official document) click here.

Where is perchlorate found?

Perchlorate is found in groundwater, surface water, drinking water, and also in our food sources around the country.  To find out whether perchlorate has been detected in your community, click here.  This list is not exhaustive and it is possible that you may be exposed to perchlorate in your drinking water even if your city is not on the list.  Some independent experts estimate that as many as 40 million Americans are affected by perchlorates in their drinking water.

What level of perchlorate consumption is considered “safe”?

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) conducted a study and issued a report in 2004 that stated that daily ingestion of up to 0.0007 milligrams per kilogram of body weight will not result in an adverse effect on the health of even the most sensitive populations.  This translates to a Drinking Water Equivalent Level of 24.5 ppb-based on an average body weight of 70 kg or 154 pounds.  While this is the “official” recommended level, independent studies have demonstrated adverse health effects of perchlorate consumption at levels inferior to the 0.0007 mg/kg of body weight.

The amount of perchlorate ingested by an exclusively breastfed baby will significantly exceed this recommended reference dose.

How are we exposed to perchlorate?

Contaminated drinking water is the most likely way to ingest perchlorate, according to the EPA.  Perchlorate has been detected in ground and surface water in 26 states and one territory. While it has often been detected in water supplies in close proximity to sites where solid rocket fuel is manufactured or used, there are also many locations in the United States lacking a clearly defined source.  Drinking water contaminated with perchlorate has been found throughout the country, however the highest density of perchlorate detection was found to be in Southern California, west central Texas, along the east coast between New Jersey and Long Island and in Massachusetts. In these communities perchlorate levels have been found to exceed the recent EPA recommendations by as much as 100 to 1000 times.

Because so many of our food sources also contain water or are irrigated with water, perchlorate is also found in lower concentrations in a variety of foods.  Studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Nov. 2004) and the Environmental Working Group (Apr. 2003) detected perchlorate in samples of lettuce in California. Several other studies also detected perchlorate in milk samples taken from California and Texas.

Water infused with perchlorate is used to irrigate crops throughout California-our nation’s largest producer of fresh produce.  It is found in high concentrations in leafy green vegetables.  Buying “organic” provides no safety from perchlorates as the organic label certification processes only review the direct use of pesticides, not the quality of the water used for irrigation.  Perchlorate is also found in meat-in particular grazing animals-who can ingest perchlorate from their own feed irrigated with contaminated water.

What can we do?

There is no question that perchlorate in groundwater and surface water (the sources of our drinking water) should be monitored, controlled, and ultimately eliminated.  At the very least it should be regulated in our drinking water, and ideally it should be eliminated from all water sources as it inevitably makes its way up the food chain due to irrigation.

We can write directly to President Obama to urge him to stop allowing America’s mothers and babies to be poisoned-and require the EPA to regulate perchlorate in our water.  We can write to our city and state officials urging them to do the same.  California and Texas are already moving to regulate perchlorate contamination in drinking water, and other states may follow suit.

Finally, we can all do our part to conserve water.  The more water we use, the more we compromise our water quality.  Low aquifers mean high concentrations of all types of contaminants, including perchlorates.  Vanishing aquifers mean that cities and states must find new sources of drinking water-replacing high-quality underground sources with water from rivers or lakes.  America’s rivers and lakes are almost universally contaminated with all sorts of pollutants that accumulate as water runs over the ground and absorbs perchlorates, pesticides, chemicals and even nuclear waste-most of which are not regulated by the EPA and sent straight to our taps.

We can’t continue to pander to corporate interests at the expense of our nation’s health, or continue consuming water as if it were an endless resource.  Perchlorate is the most recent harmful contaminant we’re finding in our water but if we continue in this direction, tomorrow will certainly reveal others.

• For more tips on how to advocate for perchlorate regulation, visit Nuprana’s Advocate section.
• For affordable and easy-to-use products that can help you conserve water in your home our business, visit Nuprana’s Purchase section.

Additional sources of information about perchlorate:

American Water Works Association

U.S. EPA

Elizabeth Beachy is co-founder and co-owner of Nuprana.com, a socially-conscious family business dedicated to water conservation.

The world’s water supplies are drying up. Half of the planet’s wetlands have disappeared over the past century. In Europe, six in every 10 cities with more than 100,000 people are using their groundwater supplies at a faster rate than they are being replenished, the European Environment Agency reports.

Water experts have coined the phrase “water stressed” to describe the scenario. It’s reckoned that countries require 4,654 litres of water per year per person to meet citizens’ needs. If they fall short, they are said to be stressed.

Today, the term covers about 440 million people, including the inhabitants of European states such as Denmark and Poland. In much of the Middle East and some parts of Africa the situation is even worse.  By 2075, the number of people in regions with chronic water shortages is estimated to be between three and seven billion, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute.

So what’s behind the water scarcity? In short: man. The world’s population has tripled over the past century and is expected to increase by about 50% to more than nine billion by 2050.

Simple population growth is not the whole answer, however. Rapid rates of industrialisation, urbanisation and wealth accumulation mean that people are now using on average six times more water than they were a century ago. Water consumption is expected to continue doubling every two decades, a recent report by Goldman Sachs says.

Virtually every industrial activity requires water. The likes of power-generation, mining, paper and drinks sectors are particularly water intensive. Non-industrial services, meanwhile, such as tourism and entertainment, can depend heavily on water resources as well.

Even the water that industry doesn’t use up is often made unpotable. Back in 2001, before an official crackdown on pollution, Chinese businesses were dumping an estimated 23.4bn tonnes of sewage and industrial waste a year into the Yangtze river. In Europe, only five of the continent’s primary rivers are considered pollution-free.

Farming’s thirst

By far the biggest water-use culprit, however, is agriculture. Farmers are thought to be responsible for 70% of all human water use. That percentage is set to rise, according to the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute. Farmers will need 2,000tn litres of water a year by 2030 to keep pace with the world’s growing food needs, the institute says.

Climate change presents an additional threat to world water supplies in the coming century.  It is predicted that global warming will increase evaporation rates across much of the planet and cause freshwater held in glaciers to melt. Rainfall could also drop off dramatically in some parts of the world.

It’s not only policymakers that need to worry about a world with less water. Business should be concerned too. Today’s panic over the scarcity of credit could be minor in comparison with tomorrow’s threat of water scarcity.

“Lack of water of adequate quality directly reduces production,” says Marc Levinson in a recent report by the investment bank JP Morgan. Agriculture, drinks and food processing are most vulnerable to water shortages, he says. All businesses, however, would be affected by the increased input costs that would result from diminishing water supplies. Companies would also see their capital expenditure rise as they were forced to find expensive new ways of treating and extracting water.

Levinson raises the further spectre of regulatory risk. To date, rules governing water use and discharge have been relatively light for companies. Many countries subsidise water use for agriculture. Introducing water permits and fixed prices are two obvious ways governments could intervene to control water use.

Drought-hit Australia shows what might be round the regulatory corner. Earlier this year, it introduced a cap on ground and surface water usage for the Murray-Darling Basin, the country’s most important agricultural area.

The probability of reputation damage presents a third major risk for the business community. As access to water decreases, people will be looking to point the blame. “Water is a very emotional issue and, although business isn’t the biggest user of water, it risks being the first to be cut off,” says Anne Léonore Boffi, water project office at the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Coca-Cola knows this only too well. Five years ago, campaigners in the south Indian state of Kerala began blaming the US soft-drinks company for a sudden shortfall in local water supplies, dubbing it “Killa Cola”. Its bottling plants were accused of polluting local aquifers.

Many risks lurk in multinationals’ supply chains rather than their own direct activities: food and drink companies, for example, depend heavily on irrigated agriculture for raw materials.

JP Morgan estimates that the combined water consumption of Nestlé, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Danone approaches 575bn litres a year – enough to cover the daily basic water needs of everyone on the planet.

Read full article

This is a time for decision and action. We found this video, we loved it and think that a very relevant point is being made here. They ask whoever sees it to send it on to five friends, and we decided to do a little more. Thank you for watching it and please resend it to more than five of your friends. You will be doing this country a favor.

5 Friends Vote

I encourage everybody to see this film, to blog about it, to talk about it with your friends and remember that this kind of abuse is possible not only in third world countries, but here in the US. So listen, dig deeper into the news, don’t just trust what you see on mainstream media.

Thanks Ms. Segovia for sharing this with us along with another interesting project called Take Back the Tap. You can rest assured that Nuprana.com will always support initiatives like this one.

Our focus is water conservation and we are committed to creating awareness about this issue and protecting our watersheds. Our ultimate goal is to prevent water shortages that have the potential to create situations like this, where people are abused by the ‘owners’ of their water. How can this be happening when we haven’t yet reached a real water crisis? The only explanation possible is CORRUPTION. We must make sure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again, particularly as water becomes more scarce and hence more valued.

Inspired by this situation, we, Elizabeth Beachy (a public health professional with 10+ years of experience in social marketing/health communications) and Osvaldo Gomez (an MBA with 10+ years experience in marketing and sales), created NUPRANA LLC. We wanted to do something to help preserve the precious natural resources that are left for our son’s generation to enjoy. And of all of our natural resources, none is more precious than water.

Surrounded by the desert, we decided to order high-efficiency fixtures for our home. It took us quite awhile to find the appropriate fixtures on-line but we finally did, installed them, and saw how easy it was to save water. With new fixtures we were able to save significant amounts of water without having to make any major changes to our daily water-use behaviors.

The more we learned about New Mexico’s water situation, the more we started to worry about our family’s health. We will soon be drinking water from the Rio Grande potentially contaminated with pesticides, radioactive waste, and many other non-regulated pollutants. And what about our son’s generation? Where will they get their water in 20 years and how contaminated will it be by then?

Why NUPRANA

The vision driving NUPRANA is a vision of conscious water use, cleaner waterways, safer drinking water, and pristine freshwater sources preserved and revered for their natural beauty. Systematic water conservation is necessary to make this vision a reality.

We are focusing on three main areas to encourage water conservation. The first area is education. Little is known in the general public about the state of our water, and there is still no sense of urgency about saving water, despite over half the country heading toward water shortages. To support our educational efforts we created the “LEARN” section of the Nuprana site, which provides a comprehensive overview of water issues in the world and in the United States. We also seek to keep people up to date on water conservation issues through the “Water Conservation News” section of the site, which posts recent news from local news sources around the country.

Nuprana’s second objective is to empower people to easily save water in their own homes, by offering affordable and user-friendly water conservation products that don’t require tools or a plumber to install. Nuprana products use high-efficiency technologies that compensate for decreased water flow with increased pressure, so that once the products are installed you usually won’t feel the difference. We believe this is important in order to address some of the key barriers to water conservation.

Our third area of focus is advocacy, because while we can contribute to water conservation by using less water in our homes, decisions are being made every day by our elected officials that affect our water quality and availability. We need to be proactive and educate our elected officials and our communities, so that they too can understand the importance of water conservation and make the appropriate decisions.

We encourage you to take a look at the information available on our site at www.nuprana.com. We strongly welcome your feedback! Let us know what you think of our products, the information we’ve posted, and our mission. Please contact us if there is something you think we could be doing better, or if you have suggestions as to how we can better spread the word about water conservation.

Thanks for joining us in this important mission! If we all begin to decrease our water consumption through these simple measures, we can make a difference for the generations to come.

Together, drop by drop, we can conserve the precious water that our lives depend on.

Elizabeth Beachy is co-founder of Nuprana LLC, and editor of Nuprana’s Water Conservation News. She can be reached at ebeachy@nuprana.com

Sure, oil is now priced at over US$110 a barrel (equal to 42 gallons), while in most parts of the US water only costs $0.51 per cubic meter (equal to 264.2 gallons).  That means that one gallon of crude oil is valued at $2.62 while one gallon of tap water is valued at $0.002 or one-fifth of one cent. 

But how reflective are these prices of the relative worth of these two commodities?  With countless alternative energy sources we can easily survive without oil, but we can’t survive without water.  It sustains all life on this planet and is vital to every aspect of our lives.

What would happen if water were publicly traded like oil is?  We’ve already seen what happens to the market price of water as soon as it is bottled and sold as a commodity—the price is suddenly equal to or greater than a soft drink.  That’s roughly 7000 times the $0.00025 a 16 oz. bottle of tap water should cost. 

We clearly take our water for granted.  And perhaps we take it more for granted in the U.S. than many other countries do.  Germany and France charge about 4 times what we do for water, and use about 40% less per person.

But what happens when our waterways and thus our drinking water become contaminated?  Our nation’s water sources are currently being polluted faster than at any time in the past.  In 2002, about 30% of U.S. waters were assessed by states for a report to Congress.  Results revealed that about 45% of assessed stream miles, 47% of assessed lake acres, and 32% of assessed bay and estuarine square miles were not clean enough to support uses such as fishing and swimming.  

Of perhaps even greater cause for concern is the fact that drinking water standards for levels of aluminum, foaming agents, fluoride, chloride, and a host of other viruses, bacterium, chemicals, radioactive materials and other contaminants, have not been established and are not regulated by the EPA.  So we simply don’t know how polluted our drinking water really is. 

And what will happen when our demand begins to outweigh our supply?  The EPA already estimates that 36 states will be facing local, regional, or statewide water shortages by the year 2013.   

Is our water (and our health) really worth a few days’ supply of oil?

Every barrel of oil produced requires a total of 1,851 gallons of water, according to the US Geological Survey.  This water is usually pumped out of underground aquifers that take decades to be replenished.  A process called “hydrofracking” is used in 90% of the drilling sites to get to the gas or oil, which involves shooting millions of gallons of water and drilling chemicals at explosive pressure deep underground to break up the rock.   Some chemical residue remains underground in the process.  The identity of the chemicals, which can be highly toxic, is protected as a “trade secret” thus making it difficult to know how to treat wastewater and what pollutants to look for in nearby drinking water supplies. 

The injection of fracturing fluids is not regulated by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act, thanks to an exemption for the Oil & Gas industry that was requested in 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney.  In fact, the Oil & Gas industry is the only industry in America allowed to inject known hazardous materials into our underground drinking water supplies unchecked.   As if that is not enough, the Oil/Gas industry is also exempt from the four other key Federal Environmental regulatory act protections:  Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, CERCLA/Superfund law, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, in addition to the public right-to-know provisions under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

Oil and gas drilling throughout the United States has resulted in thousands of wastewater spills, which have contaminated local drinking water sources.  In New Mexico alone, more than 700 cases of oil and gas companies polluting groundwater sources have been documented since 1990.  As per New Mexico’s antiquated mining laws, the maximum fine to be paid by the industry for groundwater contamination (or for any other violation of county or state laws) is $1000.

But the egregious assault on our water and our environment by Oil & Gas companies doesn’t stop there.  According to Friends of the Earth, oil companies are slated to receive more than $32.9 billion in handouts from U.S. taxpayers over the next five years.  So willingly or not, we’re participating in their plunder.  And with the world’s biggest oil companies reporting a combined $123 billion of record-breaking profits in 2007, it is hard to imagine how they have been able to continue to elude responsibility for their widespread contamination of our drinking water.

Last century’s oil or this century’s water?

Our most critical decision as we watch our natural resources become contaminated or destroyed is whether we will continue to cling to the last century’s antiquated fossil fuel dependence or whether we are ready to look and move forward. 

Will we continue to prioritize corporate profits over human health? 

Will we continue to compromise the health of our waterways—and the millions of life forms that depend on them to survive? 

Will we continue to burn fossil fuels, pollute the environment and exacerbate the global warming conditions that make our freshwater ever more scarce? 

Will we continue to take our limited clean water supplies for granted, overwatering our lawns, flushing clean drinking water down our toilets, and using many gallons more water than we truly need per day?

Or will we finally have the foresight to move toward the inevitable changes we must make, in hopes of sustaining the 7 billion people and counting on this planet? 

We need to finally shift to renewable energy sources that no longer pollute our air and our water.  We must begin to conserve the precious water we have left.  We should start paying a more appropriate price for our water, and demand that it be free of contaminants.  We need to hold our elected officials accountable for protecting our health, our environment, and our water.  

Ultimately we must look forward and begin making decisions based on the kind of world that we and our children will want to live in, in this century.

Elizabeth Beachy is co-founder of NUPRANA, a green business dedicated to making water conservation affordable and accessible to everyone.  Visit our site at www.nuprana.com to learn more.