Junk Mail Red Dot Campaign

From the Toronto Star, Feb. 10/08

Website promotes no-junk mail option

‘Red dot campaign’ raises awareness of Canada Post program to help environment

Feb 10, 2008 01:18 PM

Michael Oliveira
THE CANADIAN PRESS
With just a few seconds of effort, anyone can easily shrink their impact on the environment by telling Canada Post to stop delivering junk mail – but only two per cent of Canadian homes have done it.

Canada Post says it’s because people want to get flyers and ads delivered at their door. Vancouver’s Beth Ringdahl begs to differ.

Beth Ringdahl’s website, www.reddotcampaign.ca, spells out a simple two-step process to block junk mail: It’s as easy as filling out a downloaded form and leaving a note on your mailbox.

For more than a decade, Canada Post has been quietly acknowledging such requests, halting junk mail deliveries and marking a homeowner’s internal file with a red dot – hence the name of Ringdahl’s campaign.

The website’s only been up and running for a couple of weeks, but word is spreading fast.

Ringdahl says the letter has been downloaded more than 2,300 times, her Facebook group has swelled to more than 850 members and grateful visitors are e-mailing everyone they know about the site.

“People are really happy to learn about a way they can reduce the waste in their lives,” she said.

“(The campaign) is like a friendly reminder saying, ‘Hey guys, here’s something you can do that will take away some clutter and save some trees.”‘

Canada Post spokeswoman Lillian Au said Ringdahl’s campaign is unnecessary – Canadians, she says, have known for years about the opt-out option.

“It has been in place since 1997, so we feel that we’ve done a good job and people know that they have that right,” Au said.

Au acknowledged that unaddressed advertising mail is one of Canada Post’s fastest growing revenue streams – it brought in $339 million in 2006, up 14.4 per cent from 2005 – and helps keep costs down for consumers, while allowing small businesses to advertise in an affordable way.

Almost all of the promotional mail is recyclable and printed on recycled paper, she added.

But Au also confirmed Ringdahl’s theory that marketers would likely end up printing fewer flyers if there were fewer homes that received the junk mail.

“We make regular updates to our mailers, who can adjust the amount of material being printed so they don’t print excess flyers,” Au said.

Ringdahl said she never intended to do battle with Canada Post, and instead applauds its policy. She’s just trying to do a better job promoting it.

“I really think this is a world-class system that they have set up, and I don’t want it to be a cop out (for) the individual, saying, ‘Oh, Canada Post didn’t tell me how to do this.”‘

Her next goal is to target homeowners who don’t speak or understand English so the campaign’s reach grows even further.

Valerie Langer of the environmental group Forest Ethics applauded the campaign, which she said was a mystery to even those who are working to protect Canadian forests.

“It’s giving people the kind of information that starts them thinking and allows them to act in a way that conserves paper and therefore forests,” Langer said.

Langer herself just recently learned about opting out, she added.

If homeowners decide they do want to stop receiving junk mail, Au said printing out the letter on Ringdahl’s website isn’t necessary; a note on the mailbox – inside the door if the box is in an apartment building or condo – will suffice.

A warning, however: stopping junk mail also halts delivery of municipal-service notices such as town hall meeting announcements and snow removal and garbage pickup schedules, Au said.

Donating

For those of us who are decluttering and aren’t quite sure how to get rid of stuff, here’s a link to a Charity Village website that lists agencies accepting donations. Not all of it applies to us here in York Region, but it’s a start.
http://www.charityvillage.ca/cv/charityvillage/donate.asp

Recycling plastic

Seems recycling still has people stymied. Here’s a column from the Era-Banner on recycling plastics that should set you straight.

By: Ellen Mole
All recycling is good. It saves solid waste from going to the landfill and it takes less energy to make something new from something old than to make it from raw materials.

But plastic recycling is perhaps more virtuous than other types of recycling. That’s because plastic is made from oil, which as we all know, is a non-renewable resource in ever-scarcer supply. What’s more, plastic takes a long time to break down in landfill and often releases toxic chemicals if incinerated.

The proposal to reduce plastic bag use in Ontario is great news, because plastic bags cannot be recycled in blue box programs and private recycling collection points cannot handle the volume. But it’s only the tip of the plastic waste mountain.

Fortunately, Aurora’s blue box program expanded its plastics collection a few years ago, making it easier to recycle a wider variety of plastics. Yet confusion still abounds, as shown by those who have taken the Aurora Environmental Advisory Committee’s Blue Box Challenge.

The challenge presents more than 30 household items, some common, some not. Challengers are asked to sort them between the blue box and the garbage. Even those who consider themselves eco-savvy are usually surprised by the number of items they get wrong. And plastic items seem to be the ones most commonly mis-sorted.

So here’s a countdown of the steps for recycling plastics.

Step 1: Check for a number. Most plastic items will have the triangular recycling symbol with a number in the centre. It may be tiny, so keep hunting. If you’ve checked an item thoroughly and found no number, the item must go in the garbage.

Step 2: Lucky number 7. Anything numbered 8 or above has to go in the garbage. Anything numbered 1 through 7 can be rinsed and put in the blue box - with a few exceptions.

Step 3: Check for exceptions. · Motor oil and gasoline containers cannot go in recycling, regardless of their number. They go to the household hazardous waste depot.

· Household cleaner and pesticide bottles can be recycled, even if their contents were toxic, but only if they are empty. If you have leftover contents you don’t want, you should take the container to an hazardous waste depot, rather than dumping it.

· Styrofoam blocks and food containers may be labelled number 6 but they cannot go in the blue box.

· Lids and plastic spray apparatus from containers numbered 1 through 7 cannot be included if they are not themselves labelled with a number. All labelled lids should be placed in the blue box separately from their containers.

· Plastic films, including food wrap, milk bags and shopping bags, cannot go in the blue box.

Ellen Mole is a former member of Aurora’s environmental advisory committee. The committee can be reached through its website at www.e-aurora.ca/eac, or via the newsroom at newsroom@erabanner.com.

Hauling it in

Well, snow’s been gone for a month, so any excuse about the litter winter left behind can’t hold.

Still the area around Sheppards Bush abounds and parts of it too that back onto an industrial area whose dumpster can’t seem to hold their loads.

Today’s count:

• 7 Tim Hortons cups + 2 lids
• 1 Country Style cup + lid
• 1 Wendy’s soft drink cup
• 4 water bottles
• 2 pop cans
• 1 juice can
• 1 glass juice bottle
• 3 beer bottles

Someone once asked me why I was targeting Tim Hortons. I’m not. It’s just that the cups form the proportionately highest number of things I pick up.

Recyling coffee cups

There’s been a lot of confusion about coffee cups and which ones, if any, we can recycle here in York Region, but thanks to Mike Birett of the region’s waste management department, I’ve got some answers.
We have a huge recycling facility in East Gwillimbury at Davis Drive and Woodbine Ave. It’s on the farm of the father of someone I grew up with.

Now the harvest is recyclables and yes, I’ve checked, we can recycle Tim Hortons cups here and cups from other chains too, such as Coffee Time and Country Style.

While these vessels have a non-recyclabe liner, recycling mills still accept them. However, after all is said and done, the liner is left behind as waste, reducing the value of the cups.

Municipalities decide whether to accept those cups in their recycling programs after weighing out the factors of cost to recycle as opposed to sending to landfill and the convenience to residents.

York Region has decided that it will recycle our coffee cups. Best of all to use your own mug though and save a few pennies in the process.

I should add though that soft drink cups are absolutely unwanted because there is so little recyclable fibre in them.

An overwhelming task to weave your way through this mass of information.

Also overwhelming is a visit to the recycling facility, which gladly gives tours to interested groups. Contact the waste management department at recycling@region.york.on.ca or call the Region at 905- 895-1200 and press 3 for info.

Bagging it

I was going to do all kinds of research in relation to shredded paper and our recycling system in response to a bit of hue and cry in our local papers, but before I got around to it, a kind reporter from the Era-Banner did it for me. I’ve copied it below.

And, I do still pick up litter, but don’t think a daily list of it is all that interesting or relevant. More important are the implications I think.

The environmental advisory committee of the Town of Aurora is developing an anti-litter strategy. Suggestions welcome in the comment section below. 

Apr 12, 2007 08:12 AM

By: Serena Willoughby, Staff Writer

What are you putting in your blue box?If it’s plastic bags or shredded paper, York Region wants you to cut it out.

Plastic bags become tangled in the sorting equipment and jam recycling machines while shredded paper gets mixed with other recyclable items, contaminating the streams and making those materials harder to recycle.

An analysis of what was contaminating the waste stream told the region it needed to better inform you about what should be going in your blue box, said Mike Birett, York’s manager of diversion.

For example, many people buy flats of plastic water bottles or canned beverages and although the cardboard is recyclable, the clear plastic film encasing the beverages isn’t.

Part of the challenge for those who operate the region’s waste management facility in East Gwillimbury is keeping abreast of the different kinds of packaging being produced, Mr. Birett said.

While they’ve tried to tailor the facility to accept a variety of items, producers are constantly coming up with new kinds of packaging.

Another example is a 15-litre water container that sits on top of a water cooler.

Grocery stores tout them as being recyclable, but, in fact, can’t be recycled by the region’s facility.

That’s why the region is working with the province to bring about legislation to make retailers take back packaging such as plastic bags and styrofoam, Mr. Birett said.

In the early 1990s, many stores were beginning to collect packaging materials, but the programs died out as public interest in environmental programs waned, he said.

Earlier this month, a town in Manitoba took a different approach to keeping plastic bags out of the waste stream.

Inspired by Australia and Ireland where levies and bans have reduced the use of plastic bags, Leaf Rapids enacted a bylaw banning the bags.

Leaf Rapids partnered with Bring Your Own Bag, (bringyourbag.com), a program that works to reduce the amount of plastic bags produced.

“We don’t think everywhere could ban plastic bags tomorrow,” spokesperson Matt Wittek said.

That’s why the group spends much of its time working to bring awareness to the environmental cost of plastic bags.

“I don’t think a lot of people know plastic bags are that bad for the environment,” he said, explaining only a small percentage of the bag can be recycled, not to mention the they are made of a fossil fuel-based, non-renewable resource.

Mr. Birett agreed the best option is always for the producer to voluntarily take responsibility for their waste.

“If we have to use municipal resources to enforce a bylaw (on plastic bags), the taxpayer is ultimately paying for it,” he said.

Some companies already incorporate programs to decrease your reliance on plastic bags. Among them is the grocery chain No Frills, which charges you for each bag you use.

All Dominion and A&P stores accept used plastic bags at their locations, even ones they didn’t produce, which they recycle with other plastic film from their stores.

Retailers such as IKEA, Shoppers Drug Mart, Dominion/A & P and Cotton Ginny also offer low cost reusable bags.

The region is studying the possibility of expanding its waste management facility in East Gwillimbury to allow it to recycle more items, such as plastic bags.

But recycling shredded paper is not planned because shredding ruins the paper fibre, making it nearly impossible the recycle.

You should minimize the amount of paper you shred, the region says, only putting paper with confidential information through the shredder.

For now, those who live in Markham, Richmond Hill and Vaughan, where green bin programs are in place, can put shredded paper in their green boxes and can use plastic bags to line them.

York’s northern six municipalities — Newmarket, Aurora, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, Whitchurch-Stouffville and King — won’t have green box programs until September.

Your best bet for keeping shredded paper and plastic bags out of the waste stream is returning plastic bags to a retailer and putting shredded paper in your back yard composter.

For more information on York Region’s efforts to improve producer responsibility, go to www. amrc.ca/policy/draftEPR.pdf

For information and a list of retailers involved in campaigns to reduce reliance on plastic bags, go to www.bringyourbag.com

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GREAT MOMENTS IN PLASTIC BAG HISTORY

1957: The first baggies and sandwich bags on a roll are introduced.

1958: Poly dry cleaning bags compete with traditional brown paper.

1966: Plastic bag use in bread packaging takes over 25 to 30 per cent of the market.

1966: Plastic produce bags on a roll are introduced in grocery stores.

1969: The New York City sanitation department demonstrates plastic refuse bag curbside pickup is cleaner, safer and quieter than metal trash can pick up, beginning a shift to plastic can liners among consumers.

1973: The first commercial system for manufacturing plastic grocery bags becomes operational.

1974/75: Retailing giants such as Sears, J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, Jordan Marsh and Allied switch to plastic merchandise bags.

1977: The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry as an alternative to paper.

1982: Kroger and Safeway start to replace traditional craft sacks with polyethylene “T-shirt” bags.

1990: The first blue bag recycling program begins with curbside collection.

1990: Consumer plastic bag recycling begins through a supermarket collection-site network.

1992: Nearly half of U.S. supermarkets have recycling available for plastic bags.

1996: Four of five grocery bags used are plastic.

Source: www.plasticbag.com

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WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT PLASTIC BAGS?

· 100 million plastic bags a week go to landfills

· Plastic bags can take 15 to 1,000 years to break down

· Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide.

· North America goes through 110 billion plastic shopping bags annually

· Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade, breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits that contaminate soil and waterways

· Production of plastic bags requires vast amounts of oil

· Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food

Source: www.bringyourbag.com

Quarterly report

Today, I went back to the same bit of forest as I walked yesterday.

As I was picking up stuff in the parking lot, a woman came along with her dog and asked me, “Are you picking up garbage?”

I said, “Yes. Somebody has to.”

Here’s what I got:

• 3 pop cans
• 2 water bottles
• 1 pop bottle
• 1 Coffee Time Christmas cup + lid
• 2 McDonald’s soft drink cups + 1 lid + 1 straw
• 1 cigarette pack
• 1 beer bottle

Since it’s the end of March, I thought it was time for a quarterly report: Here are some very rough totals of the major litter items I’ve encountered over the last couple of  months.

• 129 coffee cups
• 85 water bottles
• 83 pop cans
• 16 pop bottles
• 16 beer cans
• 32 beer bottles

I took some of my finds to the The Beer Store and came out with $5.70. Enough to go for a beer.

More wet statistics

As an adjunct to a previous post about bottled water, here’s some of what Kairos Canada (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, www.kairoscanada.org) has to say about bottled water:

Waste: Millions of plastic bottles are not recycled and end up in landfills, in parks and along roadways. Nine out of ten plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.

That’s 30 million discarded plastic bottles each day— more than 10 billion a year. Large amounts of energy is consumed in manufacture, transportation, and recycling of the bottles.

Toxicity: In 2002, 1.5 million tons of plastic was used to package 6 billion gallons of bottled water. The production of this plastic leads to the release of a variety of chemicals.

Most smaller bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which, according to the Berkeley Ecology Center, generates more than 100 times more toxic emissions than an equivalent amount of glass. Leaching of chemicals into the water is also a concern.

“Eight of the ten 5-gallon polycarbonate jugs we checked left residues of the endocrine disrupter, bisphenol A, in the water” (Consumer Reports 8/00).

More research is needed regarding leaching of harmful chemicals from all types of plastic bottles. Leaching increases with heat, raising concern about storage and transportation of the bottles.

No problems have been associated with refillable stainless steel containers.

Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has weaker regulations than the E PA regulations for tap water. (“ What’s in that Bottle?” Consumer Reports 1/03.) Bottled water sold within states is regulated only by state agencies. NRDC tested more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. They found contamination exceeding allowable limits in at least one sample from about one-third of the brands, including synthetic organics, bacteria, and arsenic. (www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bwbwinx.asp)

WATER QUALITY: AWASH IN PLASTIC BOTTLES

The bottled water industry promotes bottled water as a h e a l t h y, trendy drink, without mentioning that it can cost 1,000 times as much as tap wa t e r. The Sierra Club believes that all people should have access to affordable, clean drinking water. This means protecting water sources and funding for upgrading municipal systems should be a national priority. If you are concerned about the quality or taste of your tap wa t e r, it is much cheaper to install a water filter on your tap to remove the pollutants than to depend on bottled water.

COST OF BOTTLED WATER

Cost Comparison

Bottled water can cost 1,000 times more than tap water —so much more it’s almost impossible to portray in a bar chart.

SOURCES:
Tap:$.0015/gallon average, American Water Works Association,2002
www.tawwa.org/story_of_water/html/costs.htm
Filtered:$.13/gallon average, www.waterfiltercomparisons.com
Bottled:$1.27/gallon average, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC),
March 1999 www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp
tap water: $.0015/gallon
filtered water: $.13/gallon
$.25 $.50 $.75 $1.00 $1.25
bottled water: $1.27/gallon

GLOBAL CORPORATE THREAT

Having created a growing market for bottled water, transnational corporations are exercising their power to get access to springs, aquifers, and municipal water supplies to keep their profits flowing, with little regard for the environmental impacts of large water withdrawals. Nestlé has taken over many small, independent companies, set up much larger operations at local springs, and is aggressively pursuing new sites around the Unites States. Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina brands depend on cheap municipal water in the United States. Coke’s bottled water operation in India is embroiled in controversy, where a “ Boycott Coke” campaign is underway.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

• Avoid using bottled water unless absolutely necessary.
• Use reusable stainless steel containers and carry tap water with you when traveling.
• At public events and at home, offer pitchers of water.
• Find out where bottled water sold in your stores comes from and if the pumping is impacting the environment.
• Advocate for strict state and local groundwater laws to protect aquifers and other water resources.
• Ensure that good quality tap water is available for everyone in your community at an affordable price.
• Advocate for adequate funding and good public management of municipal water systems.
• Research the quality of your public drinking water.
• Join with Sierra Club in protecting our rivers, streams, and wetlands from pollution to assure high quality public water supplies.

To learn more and get involved in the Sierra Club’s bottled water campaign, visit
www.sierraclub.org/cac/water That’s just a very small lead to the fact that today, I picked up two water bottles. I must say that I pick and choose what I pick up.

The coffee cups are soggy these days, so it’s much easier to pick up bottles and cans. In fact, I did very little of that either. It’s just too overwhelming. Instead, I’m trying to find out from the town what its anti-litter initiatives are and am going to pummel it with ideas.
So, here’s my list:

• 3 pop cans
• 2 beer cans
• 2 water bottles
• 1 Country Style cup + lid
• 1 Tim Hortons cup
• 1 Coffee Time cup
• 1 cigarette pack
• 1 sample liquor bottle
• 3 full-sized liquor bottles
• 8 beer bottles

On a weekend walk, I also collected six beer bottles. My husband says I look like one of those old guys who comb the ditches.

So, I thought I’d play the part and went out of my way to look for bottles in parking lots. And, I consider myself successful.

When I returned a load of wine bottles to the Beer Store the other day, I got an earful from an employee about how they weren’t staffed to accept all the recyclables coming in and how they didn’t have warehouse space either.

Come summer, he predicted, people would be lined up out the door waiting to have their returns accepted. And, now there are loads of cardboard boxes to contend with too.

Under questioning, he did allow that The Beer Store bid on the contract for accepting these returnables, so that if there wasn’t enough staff etc. to do so, it was because head office hadn’t invested in it.

Water and waste

The David Suzuki Foundation doesn’t deal with waste and recycling, so I can’t get my number-of-water-bottles-in-a-year figure from them.

Instead, here’s a story pulled from the Toronto Region Conservation Authority’s website, which contains a figure on bottled water use in Canada, as well as lots of other scary information:

A long drink of (bottled) water

Remember the days when a drink of water was just a drink of water? You simply turned on the tap and filled your glass — and for only a fraction of a cent. In the past decade, however, our notion of drinking water has changed radically.

08/09/2006  - Whether it’s to stay hydrated, to avoid chemicals and pollutants, or simply for the sake of improved taste, more Canadians are passing up the faucet in favour of bottled water.

Last year, Canadians drank 28.5 billion litres of bottled water. And it’s not just plain spring water we’re drinking. Today, we’re awash in bottled water — you can choose between spring, mineral, artesian, purified, oxygenated, vitamin-enriched and even flavoured waters. With some brands costing as much as $1.80 a glass (250 ml), bottled water is big business. But is it any better than tap water?

Bottled water differs from tap water in two ways — the water source and how it’s distributed. The water that flows from your kitchen tap comes from the surface water of lakes, reservoirs and rivers. To destroy disease-causing bacteria and viruses, most drinking water supplies are disinfected with chlorine, although some cities use ozone and small amounts of chlorine to disinfect their water.

Most bottled water comes from protected underground formations, from which the water flows naturally to the earth’s surface. This water is collected at the spring or via a hole that taps the underground formation. Bottled water does not contain chlorine; instead, it’s purified using ozone or ultraviolet light.

On the whole, Canadians have access to clean tap water, thanks to chlorination. But water-treatment systems can fail from time to time. In May, 2000, the deadly contamination of the Walkerton, Ont., town water supply with E. coli bacteria raised serious concerns about the safety of drinking water in Canada — and caused many people to turn off the tap.

But adding chlorine to municipal water supplies is a double-edged sword. Chlorine does destroy disease-causing bugs, some of them deadly, but the disinfectant also reacts with decaying leaves and other organic materials to form compounds called trihalomethanes (THMs). In the lab, animals exposed to high levels of these chlorine byproducts have a greater risk of cancer. Research in humans has also linked long-term exposure to high levels of THMs with colon and bladder cancer.

High levels of THMs may also have an effect on pregnancy. A California study of 5,144 pregnant women found that women who drank five or more glasses of cold tap water containing at least 0.75 micrograms of THMs per litre were more likely to miscarry than those who drank less. According to data collected from eight Canadian provinces between 1994 and 2000, the average THM level in drinking water samples was 66 micrograms per litre. Health Canada’s guideline for THMs in drinking water is 100 micrograms per litre; the cancer risk at this level over a lifetime is considered extremely low.

If you don’t like the idea of chlorine byproducts in your tap water, you can filter out the majority of them. Pitcher-type filters and many faucet devices use an activated carbon filter to remove chlorine contaminants and chemicals such as copper, mercury and lead. Small amounts of lead can be harmful, especially to infants, young children and pregnant women. Symptoms of long-term exposure to low lead levels include anemia, impaired mental function, loss of appetite, fatigue, irritability and headache.

Lead can make its way into tap water from lead solder in plumbing, service connections or pipes in your home. Lead is more likely to be found in homes built before 1950 or in very new homes. (In newer homes, it takes several years for a protective coating of minerals to build up inside the pipes, which helps keep lead from leaching from solder into the water.)

Lead levels rise in tap water as it sits in the pipes. To reduce your exposure, run the cold water first thing in the morning and any other time the system hasn’t been used for a few hours. Be sure to use cold water for drinking, cooking and making baby formula, since hot water is likely to contain more lead.

If you don’t want to filter your water, you can drink bottled water instead. Technically speaking, bottled water is just water that’s sold in sealed containers — but there are differences. Spring water comes from a protected underground source. Mineral water is spring water, as well, but it must contain more than 500 milligrams per litre of dissolved solids, including calcium, magnesium and, in some cases, sodium.

The mineral content is often stated on labels in ppm (parts per million), which means milligrams per litre. For example, the sodium content of Appolinaris mineral water is 470 ppm, or 470 milligrams of sodium per litre. Spring or mineral water can also contain natural or added carbonation.

Not all bottled water comes from a natural spring, even if the label depicts pristine meadows, icy glaciers or blue Caribbean water. About 25 per cent of bottled water, including Dasani (Coca-Cola Company) and Aquafina (PepsiCo Inc.), is just purified tap water. Purified water is produced by distillation, de-ionization or reverse osmosis; it can come from a spring, a well or the municipal water supply.

Some bottled waters are just plain gimmicky. Manufacturers claim oxygen-enhanced waters pack more oxygen than regular water and taste better. Some companies even boast that oxygenated water is ideal to boost energy and physical performance. But one study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that oxygenated water had no impact on athletic performance. And when researchers analyzed the water, they found a single breath of air contained more O{-2} than an entire bottle of super-oxygenated water.

There is a downside to getting all your water by twisting off a cap — too little fluoride, a mineral needed to reduce the likelihood of developing cavities. Unlike tap water, most bottled waters don’t contain optimal fluoride levels (0.8 to 1.0 ppm). Only a few brands have added fluoride. Check the label to see if a particular bottle of water contains the mineral — you’ll find the fluoride content listed in ppm.

If you drink bottled water, don’t assume it’s immune to bacterial contamination. Be sure to refrigerate an opened bottle, in case harmful bacteria have been introduced since the seal was broken. Don’t re-use your water bottle, either; such bottles are intended for single use only. Refrigerate bottled water once you buy it, or store it in a cool place away from heat, sunlight and household chemicals. Check bottling and best-before dates to ensure freshness. Bottled water can be stored for up to two years.

The bottom line: Stay hydrated. The source of water you use is a personal decision, but make sure you drink enough. Men need 3 litres of water a day and women need 2.2 litres; you need more water during physical activity and hot, humid weather. Not all of our water requirements have to come from drinking water — fruit and vegetable juices, milk, soy beverages, even coffee and tea count, too.

And in case you’re wondering, I drink bottled spring water. I made the switch after I became tired of refilling my Brita pitcher numerous times each day — in my house we go through a lot of water.

Leslie Beck, a Toronto-based dietitian at the Medcan Clinic, is on CTV’s Canada AM every Wednesday.
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I do have the decimal point in the right place. If all that comes in 500 millilitre bottles (which I know it doesn’t) that means that we go through 57 billion water bottles a year.

So, I guess I can’t complain if I find a few of them around. Even so, it seems an unnecessary use of oil.

Back in town

Well, California has roadside litter, even in the tony town of Los Altos where I stayed.

Abandoned cushions from lawn furniture, the usual fast food stuff and beer bottles and a quarter. But, still way, way better than Aurora.

Two American cities in two months have broken the stereotype of dirty streets, while Aurora has belatedly followed its American cousins into trashdom. Hopefully we can emerge on the other side.

I can tell you Los Altos has a special container for yard waste and recycling, although it seems to be limited to plastic, cans and newspaper. Could be wrong though.

While in California, I took a tour of Google. In the lobby of one of their several buildings, there was a rolling screen featuring the titles of searches being made.

Brings out the prankster in me and I want to enter a joke search to entertain those viewing the screen.

In my initial foray around Aurora yesterday, I picked up an empty container of windshield fluid in the parking lot of Canadian Tire and took it in to be thrown out.

As well, I pointed out the litter in the planters outside the CIBC to a teller. She said she was going to phone the town to clear them out.

I wonder if I bugged her enough, and she bugged the town enough whether there would be more garbage cans put on Yonge Street, or maybe litter sweeps. Then others would be less inclined to toss trash, and the streets would stay cleaner. Kind of like what they did in New York.