A lot of people were forced to ask themselves what am I drinking after it was determined that in Flint, Michigan, state government had diverted water from a treated source to the Flint River (an untreated source), and to put it crudely, was by omission poisoning its residents. Here people were walking around thinking that water from a publicly operated utility was safe to drink; and that if that was NOT the case, someone in authority would notify them.
At the same time, while I have been spending the winter in a Santa Monica neighborhood, I came across water labelled “Reverse Osmosis.” The locals were purchasing this water for 25 cents per gallon. Interesting, right? I am now doing the same but I do not know what reverse osmosis means. What I know is this water is clean enough to drink and it’s cheap. So why didn’t the decision-makers for Flint, Michigan figure out a way to implement this type of water filtration system for water they knew was contaminated?
Wikipedia says ‘reverse osmosis’ “ … (RO) is a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane to remove larger particles from drinking water. In reverse osmosis, an applied pressure is used to overcome osmotic pressure, a colligative property, that is driven by chemical potential, a thermodynamic parameter.” To better understand this and to put it in terms I could understand I went to YouTube.
In one experiment, which I am sharing here (because this is where I learned what I am passing on), the distilled water had zero milligrams per liter of total dissolved solids (TDS) while reverse osmosis water had 27 parts per milligram and tap water had 247 milligrams. It’s scary that our bodies have adjusted to this level of fluoride, salts, bacteria, viruses and you name it in tap water.
After a few days in commune with the desert in Dubai, I was reminded that life on the planet as we know it is rapidly changing. Water is not a renewable resource. Practically speaking, we will have to find ways to desalinate water and repurpose waste water. How that is done will take more than the people in city governments to figure out. We need innovators, makers and creators. While the thought of drinking water from one’s toilet is not pleasing, living in Southern California reminds me this is what continued life on the planet includes.
In the meantime, I will make different decisions about my water source. Because clean water should be a human right even though I know that in many #womenslives, this is not the case.
How do you feel about where your water comes from?
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