STAY AWAY FROM "DASANI" WATER!!

We all want to hope that bottled water is safe.... well it all depends on the source of water they use.

Are we happy with our tap water? it doesnt matter, Coca Cola is planning to begin drawing water out of a RIVER and treat it to start a bottled water program...

DASANI, a bottled water company owned by Coca-Cola is doing what everyone else is, Bottling water from a river that has been a focus of enviromental studies.

I have two press releases here, the first from Coke, The second from an enviromental group near the river in Ore.

Please read both and STAY AWAY FROM "DASANI" WATER

Coca-Cola may bottle Willamette River water
November 2008

U.S. Water News Online

PORTLAND, Ore. —
Filtered water from the Willamette River may soon be bottled and sold by Dasani.
Coca-Cola Bottling of Oregon plans a $35 million expansion of its suburban Wilsonville plant near Interstate 5 to include Dasani water, adding 17 jobs in Wilsonville and 45 in the surrounding area.
Bottled water is not without controversy.

Critics say that filtering and bottling tap water, as Dasani and some other brands do, just packs landfills with bottles when people could simply turn on a faucet in their homes.
But the American Beverage Association says bottled water is different from tap water because it goes through additional filtering.

“While the source may be municipal, the (filtering) process is advanced beyond what any municipality does,” Craig Stevens, spokesman for the beverage industry organization, told The Oregonian.
Dasani filters city water and uses a reverse osmosis process to remove most of the minerals and “impurities,” said Dora Wong, spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Bottling of Oregon. The company then adds its own mix of minerals.

At the start of 2009, Oregon will add water bottles to the state recycling program, tacking on a five-cent deposit to the price. The legislation is expected to reduce the roughly 125 million water bottles reaching state landfills, according to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
The Coca-Cola plant has been in Wilsonville for more than 20 years and currently employs 107 people, said Mayor Charlotte Lehan.

Wilsonville is the only city in the Portland area to take its drinking water from the Willamette. Farther south, Corvallis and Adair Village use water from the Willamette.
Water from the Wilsonville drinking water treatment plant, built in 2002 near the river shore, has consistently met federal and state standards, according to the state Drinking Water Program.

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NOW READ THIS,,,,,,,,


Current Problems
While not all of these sources of pollution and habitat modification can be attributed to any one negative aspect of today's Willamette River, we do indeed have the following realities on the river:

The Willamette is on the Clean Water Act 303 (d) list for violations of water quality standards.

The Willamette currently violates temperature, bacteria, and mercury standards.

A large section of the river, some 40-miles known as the Newberg Pool, is home to resident fish (those that don't migrate such as the northern pikeminnow) that exhibit high percentages of skeletal deformities. For example, in some samples in this area over 50% of the juvenile fish were deformed. This section of the river, as well as others, contains PCBs, dioxin, and PAH among others.

A six-mile stretch of the river in Portland is now a federally designated Superfund site. This site is highly polluted with all manner of toxic pollution, heavy metals, and other substances. It is now going through a cleanup process that will likely push a decade to complete.
Spring Chinook and steelhead, the Willamette's native salmonids, are listed as threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

Other species such as lamprey eel and white sturgeon have been found to contain significant concentrations of man made chemicals in their tissues.

There is a fish consumption advisory for people that eat ANY species of resident fish. This is pretty much any fish other than salmon, lamprey, and sturgeon.

New studies are underway that are looking into additional impacts from toxic and other pollution on the Willamette River and the species that inhabit it.

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Be careful everyone and KNOW WHAT YOUR DRINKING!!!

DRINKINGWATERSAFE.COM staff..