If you are like most Americans, you are aware that water supplies are not as dependable as we would like. Over 2100 contaminants have been discovered in drinking water thus far. Our water source may be free of some of these, but who knows which are still present?
Twenty-one hundred - that is the number of contaminants identified in drinking water thus far. It's frightening and,
though Americans have greatly improved in cleaning up rivers and lakes, we are still leeching chemicals into the water sources that are causing health issues.
Many reading this will have acted on these warnings and stopped drinking faucet or well water. For you only filtered water is worthy of your family or yourself. That means you are either purchasing bottled water, or that you have bought a water filter and are purifying it yourself.
The problem is, when you go on vacation or on a camping trip, you don't want to trust the water supplies available to have the same healthy water you enjoy at home. If you are purchasing bottled water, then you'll take along a case or two. This option will probably provide you with safe water, but it is the most expensive. Over eight billion gallons of filtered water are sold annually at prices at times exceeding gasoline. Bottled water may not be as pure is the label indicates but it would be fine for camping. However, keep in mind that if you discard the plastic bottles you use on your vacation, you only add to the environmental problem of plastics that could sit in land fills for centuries.
For those who have purchased a gravity feed filter the solution is also obvious. You can pack your water filter in the car and filter all drinking and cooking water, no matter what the source. This would provide an endless supply and would guarantee that the stream or faucet water is safe for the family to drink.
What if you either have a built in filter, or don't have room to take your gravity fed water filter with you? In that case, a little planning ahead would still provide the same water you drink at home. You filter extra water and store it to take with you.
But in what should you store and transport it? The water is clean but you certainly don't want to jeopardize your family's health by storing it in unsafe containers. Perhaps you have heard the recent plastics warnings. The PET bottles (made of polyethylene terephthalate) used by most bottled water companies, are safe enough as long as they are not reused. However, if you store water in them where it is warm, plastics can contaminate the water over time.
Another option is to store your filtered water in the hard plastic bottles used for water coolers, or the smaller ones used for sports drinks. They look safe but the National Institutes of Health recently tested bisphenol used to make these bottles, and found it caused neurological problems in babies before birth. The long range effect on others is still the subject of further study. So that option may be out of the picture for you.
Few choices remain. You want the purified water from home but can’t bring the filter. If you take filtered water from home and store it in unsafe containers, you defeat your purpose. The solution to this dilemma is to filter extra water at home and store it in glass containers. This would include bottles, jars, and glass lined thermoses.
This solution answers several problems. First we won’t have the discarded bottle problem, nor the plastic leeching problem of those bottles. We will have the save clean water we filter at home, and when the bottles are empty, they can be washed and reused without danger. The resulting peace of mind will only add to the enjoyment of your vacation.
