Pesticides and Water

December 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

pineapple plantation
I came across this news that 2 of Davao’s watersheds are found to be contaminated with pesticides. They are the Talamo-Lapidas and Panigan Tamugan watersheds. These are 2 dams where the people of Davao get their tap water from.

Davao prides itself as a big exporter of fruits. It has huge tracts of pineapple, mango, papaya and banana plantations. The fruit export industry in the city gives a lot of jobs to the locals and big money for the government in the form of taxes.

But there is a negative effect to these developments. The study reports that the pesticides that were found in the watersheds are from the use of pesticides in the fruit plantations.

The pesticides are dissolved in rain water and seeped down to the ground water which runs off to the watersheds. What’s worse is that they found out that the pesticides content in the watersheds contain chemicals banned by the government.

What can we do with the pesticides? If the fruit growers in Davao will not use pesticides, can they still produce export-quality fruits? But if they continue to use pesticides, how many years before the water resources in Davao become completely contaminated with pesticides?

We need to take care of our environment mainly because if we don’t, then our health is at stake. This is happening already. Just consider how many people in the 1900’s died of cancer?

It is only now that people die left and right because of cancer. One reason is that today, there are more chemicals that we put into our bodies everyday. Today almost everything that we get in contact with has chemicals.

One of them may be coming out of our faucets or showers. Pesticides and water contamination are two big problems that we need to find solutions for. Now.

Filed Under: Conservation, Green Homes, Pollution, Toxic Wastes, Water Resources Tagged With: ,

Facts about Tap Water

December 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

tap water

The water that I drink at home is not directly from tap water. I bought it at a nearby water refilling station. 4 gallons of water cost P28 (half-dollar). It comes in 2 kind of plastic containers: one rectangular one with faucet attached and one circular one that you put in water dispenser.

The internet is filled with scary information about tap water. They say tap water contains chemicals that can cause cancer. They say that pesticides used on farms and lawns near water sources leak to our bodies. They say water contains bacteria that produce water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid.

But all the sites that give these scary information end with offers of their products: home filtration and purification systems. It makes me wonder if they didn’t manipulated the facts a bit so that people will be scared to drink tap water and buy their products instead. I wasn’t able to find any article about tap water that is not written by people who have interest in selling their products. Well, that’s the internet.

Is Manila tap water safe to drink? If only I can find dependable facts: people who are actually drinking from their tap water, then I’ll do away with my purified water from the water refilling station. It is cheap, yes, but aren’t we paying for water bills so that we can have potable water at home?

This is another reason why TODAY is the best time to go green: because greening means having clean water bodies that are the sources of our tap water. How? We’ll tackle the way in my next articles.

Filed Under: Water Resources Tagged With: ,

Simple Ways to Save Water in the Bathroom

December 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

More Tips on How to Save Water in the Bathroom

tabo

In my last post, I focused on how much water we can save if we just turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth. In this post, I will give you more tips on how to save water and money in the bathroom.

1. Use pail and “tabo” instead of shower or bath tub. Filipinos’ use of dipper is actually a water efficient technique. You can control the amount of water to pour on your body while you are taking a bath when you use a tabo or dipper.

2. Avoid taking long showers. You don’t have to stay under the shower for 30 minutes. One minute of shower uses at least half a gallon of water. If you take a bath for more than 10 minutes, that’s 10 gallons of water wasted every day. If you are using pail and tabo, use only the water that you really need for your daily bath.

3. Turn off the shower while you are soaping or shampooing.

4. While shaving, don’t clean your razor on running water from the sink faucet. Use tabo to clean your razor or plug the drain so that you’ll have water stored in the sink.

5. Use recycled water when taking a bath. During summer when there is scarcity of water, there are many Philippine households who store water whenever there is rain. Drums and pails are used to collect rain water. We can do this all year round, not just during summer. The collected rain water can be used in the bathroom.

I’m sure there are many other ways you can think of to save on your water consumption. If we conserve water today, we will have more storage of water in our dams when the El Nino or the summer season comes.

Filed Under: Everyday Green, Green Homes, Water Conservation Tagged With: ,

Simple Ways to Save Water in the Bathroom

December 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Turn Off Faucet While Brushing Teeth

turn off faucet

The shower, wash basin, toilet and bath tub are the fixtures that use the most amount of water in the entire household. If you want to save water and lower your water bills, it is primarily how you use these fixtures that will spell the difference between high water bills and low water bills. This is also the place where we help save the water resources of the earth. These simple ideas can mean million of gallons of water saved per year.

We always hear our parents say not to waste water when we are brushing our teeth. Turn off the faucet while we are brushing our teeth. Use a glass of water for brushing. We don’t know how much water is saved with this simple activity. We save approximately 7,300 gallons of water per year per household of 5.

How did I come up with that approximation? Most basin faucets use 1 gallon of water per minute. This is even a very conservative estimate because there are faucets that use up to 2.5 gallons of water every minute. But let’s just say that 1 gallon of water ooze out of the faucet every minute when it is on.

When we leave the faucet turned on while we are brushing our teeth, we more or less leave it for at least 2 minutes although most people brush their teeth for more minutes but let’s just say, it’s 2 minutes. For those 2 minutes of brushing while the faucet if left open, the water that comes out is 2 gallons.

Now, we don’t brush only once a day. In the house, we usually brush our teeth in the morning and in the evening before we sleep. So that will be 4 gallons of water when we brush with the faucet open in the morning and the evening.

Let’s say there are 5 of us in the household, so that 20 gallons of water wasted every day by not turning the faucet off while brushing teeth. 20 gallons of water wasted every day for the whole year is 7,300 gallons.

That’s only for one household. Let’s just say there are 1 million households with 5 members who do not turn off the faucet while brushing every morning and every evening everyday. That will be 7,300,000,000 or 7.3 billion gallons of water being wasted every year. During drought season or when the El Nino comes, this is enough to water acres of farming lands. This is enough water to prevent famine in the poorest places of the country when the dry season comes.

Small things can really add up to big things. Turn off water while brushing your teeth.

Filed Under: Everyday Green, Water Conservation Tagged With:
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