McCloud, California has always been the outdoor enthusiasts dream vacation destination.  The beautiful views, clean air and excellent fishing has attracted tourists from as far as Japan.  The 1,300 inhabitants of this community were living peaceful until the corporation, Nestle, found a business opportunity.

Bottled water giant, Nestle Waters North America, saw a different opportunity in this tightly knit community.  Nestle struck a 100 year deal with McCloud to empty 1,250 gallons a minute from their streams formed by melting glaciers.  This water would be bottled, packed into 300 tractor trailers every day and sell the water for up to 1,000 times the price of tap water.  The bottled water center would be the size of 5 Wal-Mart super-centers combined in one.  Nestle struck a back door deal with McCloud’s town hall to have the plant up and running by 2006.

Nestle had already opened a plant in Michigan that nearly destroyed the ecosystem of the surrounding wetlands.  The plant in Michigan was only drawing 400 gallons a minute; imagine the effects of 3 times that amount emptied from McCloud.  The people of McCloud would not let this happen to their town and have stepped up to prevent the plant from being built.  As consumers, we need to help the people of McCloud by refusing to purchase bottled water from these corporations.  The solution to stop this corporate greed is filtering your own tap water and refilling your own reusable stainless steel bottle.

Golf is one of the most popular sports in America.  Everywhere you go, golf courses are popping up.  Many people enjoy this sport and the beautiful landscape of the courses, but this all comes at the expense of the environment and water supplies.  There are over 18,000 golf courses in the United States, more than half of the world’s golf courses.  These golf courses cover more than 1.7 million acres of land which require plenty of water to irrigate. 4 billion gallons of water EVERY DAY are used to irrigate golf courses in the United States alone!

With this extreme usage of public water supplies, the golf courses use pesticides and fertilizers that run off into the surrounding environments and communities.  Studies have found that farmers and greens keepers have an unusually high percentage of lymphoma related deaths, which could also be true for the surrounding communities.  Since golf is a $49 billion dollar industry in the US, lawmakers have much less incentive to regulate the environmental impacts of the sport.  But, until the government applies more strict regulation to the golf industry, the best way to keep the public safe is to filter all their public drinking and bathing water.

If you are the average Joe or Jane reading this blog, the chances are that buying a hybrid car or installing solar panels on your house are not financially viable options to live a more green lifestyle.  While hybrids and solar panels are some of the best ways to help stop carbon emissions, this does not mean that individuals living on a budget cannot make a difference in their everyday lives.  Here are the top ways to help decrease greenhouse-gas emissions:

-Plant a garden.  Not only will this remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it will improve the appearance of your house.  A vegetable garden will also save trips to the grocery store.

-Recycling can save the energy needed to create new products.  This will also keep trash out of the landfills which generate methane gas.  Purchasing your own durable stainless steel water bottle from New Wave Enviro will save the plastic needed for bottled water, which will most likely end up in a landfill.

-Tune up your car.  A car that is properly tuned, with clean oil and oil filters and with fully inflated tires will improve gas mileage.  Along with this, riding your bike to work or using public transportation a couple days a week will help reduce your carbon footprint.

-Use less electricity.  Turn off the lights when you leave a room.  Unplug your cellphone charger when it isn’t being charged.  These appliances use energy from power plants which create carbon emissions.

 There are just a few ways that you can actually make a difference on a budget.  Try and convince a few friends that they can make a difference too because together we can add up to make a BIG difference.

How addicted are we to petroleum in the United States?  Addicted enough to pay up to 10,000 times the price of municipal water for water packed in a petroleum based bottle.  We are so addicted to petroleum products that we consume more crude oil than Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America combined!  We produce 3% of the worlds petroleum, but consume about 25% of the worlds supplies.  We needlessly add to this addiction an extra 1.5 million barrels of crude oil a year for the plastic to make water bottles.  If all of America’s bottled water drinkers stopped buying bottled water and bought aluminum water bottles from New Wave Enviro, we could power an extra 100,000 cars a year.

So, as Americans in a financial crisis, why do we still waste our money on useless plastic water bottles?  We need to quit our addiction to using petroleum products buy purchasing at home water filters and reusable water bottles.  By changing something as fundamental as the way we consume water, this will lead to changes in the other ways that we consume petroleum products.

The Environmental Protection Agency has calculated that the average American household uses approximately 280 gallons of water a day, a staggering fact.  That number is tiny compared to the 41 billion gallons of water and 2.7 million tons of plastic used annually around the world to produce bottled water.  To help reduce this misuse of household water, scientists have found that 60 to 65% of the water that goes down the drain can be reused for irrigation purposes on plants.  This water does not have to be included with the “black water” in the sewage systems.

Gray water is the next step in conservation of water supplies.  All the water used in households is drained directly into the sewage system.  The water used when you take a shower, use the laundry machine or when you wash your hands is included in this sewage water.  This water may not be drinkable after used, but it is considered “gray water” because it can be used for irrigation purposes.  Why include this gray water with the sewage when it could be used in your garden?  After all, the water used to water your yard can be used as perfectly safe drinking water with a long lasting filter from New Wave Enviro.

Along with the use of tap water for drinking water to reduce water usage on a global scale, the usage of gray water is also a great way to reduce the waste of water on a personal level.

With all the news of pollution, increasing carbon emissions, melting ice caps, etc., it is easy to feel overwhelmed with this environmental crisis.  These problems facing our planet can make you feel helpless in the fight to save Earth.  But there are plenty of simple ways we can change our daily lifestyles that actually do make a difference.  If you can convince a few friends to live this clean lifestyle and they convince a few of their friends, before you know it, you are actually making a difference in the world.  Here are a few simple tips to help live a cleaner lifestyle:

When driving on the highway, just slow down a bit.  Did you know that driving 60 mph instead of 70 mph (along with saving you from speeding tickets) will save you 4 mpg in fuel economy.  Accelerating  and braking too hard both cause more gas consumption.  Not only will you be driving green, you will also be driving safe.  Along with this, try and ride your bike or walk to work a couple days of the week and burn some calories.  If work isn’t within walking distance for you, you can also try carpooling or mass transit. Grouping errands together to just one trip also saves wasted miles driven in your car and frees up spare time.

Using your tap water instead of bottled water is a great way to cut back on wasteful packaging; the New Wave 10 stage filter offers a clean, efficient way to cut demand on water.  Did you know that a leaky toilet can waste up to 200 gallons a day?  When washing your clothes, if possible, use cold water instead of hot water.  Turning off the water when brushing your teeth and when shaving are also some other great ways to prevent waste.  Again, with the help of some friends, these are some simple ways that you can actually make a difference in the world.

Did you know that 86% of plastic water bottles used in the United States end up either as litter or in landfills as trash?  These bottles sit unchanged in landfills, for centuries, squandering our limited resources.  It is estimated that in the United States, we use 1.5 million barrels of crude oil a year toward producing the huge demand for plastic water bottles alone!  Becoming independent of foreign crude oil is a growing trend in the United States, with the long term goal of becoming totally independent from crude.  Scientists have already figured out how to change one of our everyday foods, corn, into gasoline, reducing demand on crude oil; but the possibilities do not end there.

Corn is already being used to help lessen gas consumption in the United States.  Biofuels have been changing the way we fill up our cars and help us become more energy independent.  But the next step in using corn as an alternative to petroleum will be the corn based plastic bottle.  Corn based plastic bottles from New Wave Environmental will degrade in just 80 days in a compost heap.  This simple new technology, combined with a simple at-home water filtration system could significantly reduce our needs for petroleum based plastics!

It isn’t often that we stop and think about what happens to our waste, long after we dispose of it in the trash.  Most of our trash that is not recycled is sent to landfills in various parts of the country.  Once in a landfill, our waste remains dormant, with little moisture or oxygen.  Due to these conditions, much of this waste remains in the same condition it was when it was originally disposed.  Old landfills have been excavated to find 40 year old newspapers that could still easily be read!  Most plastic bottles take 1,000 years to fully decompose!  Because this waste does not decompose, landfills have to be monitored for decades for environmental damage after they are capped off with soil.

By disposing most of our petroleum based plastics in these landfills, we are wasting a precious limited resource.  Environmentalists around the world say that the solution to this wastefulness is by simply filtering your own municipal tap water.  New Wave Environmental water filters can save you the cost of 1,500 gallons of bottled water on just 1 filter.  By doing this, we can cut back on our dependence on crude oil to create the plastics used in bottled water.  Not only will this cut our dependence on crude oil, it will save you money every day!

Fact: If every person in New York City, for just 1 week, filtered their own water to drink, we could save 24 million plastic bottles!

I just finished reading “Go Green, Live Rich 50 simple ways to save the earth (and get right trying)” by David Bach.

The book is organized into 50 tips of just 2 or 3 pages each making it easy to understand and consider actions.

As a longtime user and believer in reusable bottles, I was particularly drawn to tip #2 ’small changes such as not buying coffee in a disposable cup or water in a plastic bottle not only are good for your wallet, they actually better the planet. Some statistics: 96% of plastic bottles sold in 2005 were single serving size, which have a low recycling rate (nearly nine out of ten plastic water bottles are thrown away)

Following this tip, readers are directed to www.newwaveenviro.com to view our large line of reusable bottles and where to buy them.