Bottled water: Why not tap water? (An Undergraduate Research Experience with Huge Environmental Implications)
09/03/2008
DID YOU KNOW?
- An average American drinks 24 gallons of bottled water per year.
- Consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade.
- Americans will spend approximately $10 billion on bottled water this year.
- But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment.
- It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles end up in landfills.
OUR FINDINGS:
- The study indicates that of fountain water is safe according to USEPA standards.
- Fountain water showed very little variation in chemical parameters.
- A blind tasting experiment (29 participants) showed that an average, 42.2% of participants guessed WRONG answers about tap water.
- Participants could not tell which is which. Since most people can not determine the difference between bottled and tap water, why not drink from fountains?
Please check our research findings in the Daily Freeman Newspaper
What happens to the dirty water after we flush our campus toilets?
08/19/2008
Students from summer online environmental geology class visited the New Paltz Sewage Treatment Plant to learn about waste water treatment systems.
Students witnessed different processes of waste water treatment and how does the clean water (following the USEPA standards) eventually discharged into the Wallkill River.
Summer Time is Research Time
07/11/2008
Several students have been working on an interdisciplinary water quality project during summer 2008.
