The U.S. Energy Policy Act sets the maximum flow of shower heads at 2.5 gallons per minute (GPM) at 80 pounds per square inch (psi). The Energy policy is great for the environment, but sometimes a new shower head can turn already-low water pressure into a dismal shower experience. Those of us with thick hair need a little power behind our shower to rinse away the shampoo!

The low-flow Bernoulli power shower head is a simple yet brilliant shower head that utilizes Bernoulli’s principle to create a 2.5 GPM spray that feels like a 5 GPM spray. In the eighteenth century, Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli discovered that as the velocity of a fluid increases, its pressure decreases. Today, Bernoulli’s principle is used to in airplanes and racecars as well as eco-friendly showers.

The Bernoulli shower head was actually made for use with shower filters, since some shower filters can decrease the water pressure. By injecting air into the water stream, the Bernoulli shower head increases water pressure without using more water!

The Bernoulli shower head is easy to install and easy to use. It only took me about 5 minutes to install it. Now I can rinse my hair in less time and save even more water! And I have noticed a slight decrease in my utility bill since I installed the Bernoulli power shower head. Going green has many benefits; what’s good for the planet is good for your bank account!

The Independent reports that plastic trash releases toxic chemicals into the ocean as it breaks down.

Speaking about the results of his recent study, Katshuhiko Saido of Nihon University in Japan said, “Plastics in daily use are generally assumed to be quite stable. We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.

“The present study was conducted to clarify that drift plastic does indeed decompose to give rise to hazardous chemicals in the ocean.”

Plastic garbage, like disposed plastic water bottles, releases dangerous chemicals like bisphenol-A (BPA), which has been shown to disrupt the hormone systems of animals and humans. Styrofoam also releases styrene monomer, which is a known carcinogen.

“This study clearly shows new micro-pollution by compounds generated by plastic decomposition to be taking place out of sight in the ocean. Thus, marine debris plastics in the ocean will certainly give rise to new sources of global contamination that will persist long into the future,” said Saido.

But is plastic pollution in the ocean really a big problem? It’s probably a lot bigger than you might think. There’s an area of ocean in the North Pacific twice the size of Texas that’s permanently covered in plastic! In Japan alone, 150,000 tons of plastic wash ashore each year.

What can we do?

Minimize the use of plastic. Stop buying plastic disposable water bottles! Invest in a home water filter and reusable, non-toxic water bottles like glass bottles and stainless steel bottles.

Environmental Health News reports that California officials have set a new health goal for chromium 6 in drinking water. The new goal, designed to protect people from cancer, is thousands of times lower than the amount of chromium 6 currently found in some water supplies.

A recent federal study found that chromium can cause cancer when ingested.

The public health goal in California is 0.06 parts per billion. The state’s current standard is 50 PPB (800 times higher), and the national standard is 100 PPB. The U.S. EPA is reviewing the national standard but has not released a statement.

“We really want to see the state act very quicklly to set a drinking water standard,” said Renee Sharp of the Environmental Working Group. “This is a significant public health issue that needs to be addressed not just in California but nationally.”

The town of Hinkley, CA has ground water with chromium contamination of 580 PPB; that’s 10,000 higher than the new goal. At this level of contamination, chromium will likely cause cancer in one out of every 100 residents who drink the water throughout their life.

You may remember the town of Hinkley from the motion picture Erin Brockovich, based on the true story of a law clerk who investigated the local water contamination and high rates of cancer. Brockovich’s work led to a $333 settlement paid out to about 600 residents of Hinkley from Pacific Gas and Electric, which discharged chromium into area ponds in the 1950s and 60s.

Chromium 6 has been found in 30 percent of the drinking water in California. As for other states… well, nobody has tested for it.

“We don’t even know how big of a problem it is nationally,” said Sharp.

Home water filters with activated carbon will remove chromium, as will a reverse osmosis filter.

In the latest issue of Mother Jones, journalist Anna Lenzer exposes the marketing scam of Fiji Water.

Fiji is now America’s leading brand of bottled water, even though it’s shipped from the other side of the globe and costs three times more than basic bottled water (and 30,000 times more than tap water!). The company, led by marketing guru Lynda Resnick, has spent millions on “green” marketing efforts. As a result, celebs like Paris and Diddy can be spotted sipping Fiji Water. The trendy Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan pours only Fiji Water into its dog bowls, and at the last SXSW festival, you could enjoy a Fiji Water Detox Spa. I’m not making this stuff up!

I’ll give Lynda this much credit: If she can push bottled water that’s shipped halfway around the world as a “green” product, she truly is a marketing genius.

Here at AmbrosiaWaterFilters.com, we don’t have to employ genius-level, flamboyant marketing strategies. We like to keep things simple. For a cleaner planet and a healthier body, invest in a home water filter along with reusable water bottles (glass bottles or stainless steel bottles). This way, you’ll avoid polluting the planet with plastic bottles and avoid polluting your body with plastic toxins.

Lynda’s slick, green marketing materials don’t tell you that every Fiji bottle is made from Chinese plastic in a diesel-powered plant and shipped thousands of miles to eco-conscious consumers. Wanna be green (not just fake, plastic green)? Ditch the plastic bottles.

Tapped, a new documentary from the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car?, explains the true cost of bottled water.

In a review of the film at grist.org, Claire Thompson writes:

I knew bottled water sucks, but I didn’t know it sucks this much. Not only is it a clear waste of resources (only 20 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States are recycled, and far too many of the rest probably end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch), it’s an incredible waste of money for consumers, who pay more than the price of gasoline for water that’s marketed as “pure,” but in reality is largely unregulated, full of harmful toxins like BPA, and far less safe for drinking than free tap water. (In fact, 40 percent of the time, bottled water is nothing but municipal tap water, freed from the government oversight that keeps it safe.)

At tappedthemovie.com, the filmmakers explain how you can take action:

• Buy a water filter.
• Buy a reusable water bottle, like a glass water bottle or stainless steel water bottle.
• Replace your office water cooler with a bottleless water cooler that connects to your water line to provide hot and cold filtered water. It works like a traditional water filter, minus the risk of BPA and other toxins. And your boss will appreciate the fact that filtered tap water is so much cheaper!

At tappedthemovie.com, you can also send messages to Jennifer Aniston and Tom Brady to ask them to stop endorsing Smart Water.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the entire documentary yet, but I hope to see it soon.

Have you seen the film? If so, what did you think?

Can you believe there’s a floating island of plastic garbage twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean!?

Last month residents of the small Australian town of Bundanoon banned the sale of bottled water. Townsfolk cheered when the ban passed (almost unanimously) at a town hall meeting.

Only hours earlier, the new South Wales state premier in Australia banned all state departments and agencies from buying bottled water, calling it a waste of money and natural resources.

“I have never seen 350 Australians in the same room all agreeing to something,” Jon Dee of Bundanoon told MSNBC. “It’s time for people to realize they’re being conned by the bottled water industry.”

What’s so bad about bottled water? For starters, nearly half of all bottled water is simply bottled tap water! As many recent studies have shown, bottled water is often more polluted than tap water. The plastic bottles themselves leach hormone-disrupting chemicals like BPA into the water. Bottled water is also contributing to an environmental crisis. Plastic bottles are piling up in our landfills and oceans, and it takes a lot of energy to produce and ship those plastic bottles. Plus, bottled water can be 10,000 times more expensive than tap water!

What is “EVIAN” spelled backwards???

The citizens of Bundanoon have been battling the bottled water industry for years, ever since a large company announced plans to build a plant in town, where they would extract Bundanoon tap water, ship it to Sydney for processing, then sell it back to Bundanoon residents for a substantial profit.

Since bottled water has been banned, Bundaboon shops now sell reusable water bottles. Residents can fill up these bottles at free public water fountains or pay a small fee to use water filters kept in stores. This is a win-win situation for everybody involved. Reusable bottles like glass water bottles and stainless steel water bottles do not leach toxic chemicals into the water, nor do they contribute to the destruction of the environment.

Are you still buying bottled water? Stop being NAIVE. Invest in a home water filter today!

GOOD magazine recently published an article titled “Paging Erin Brockovich” in which they examined some America’s biggest cover-ups of poisoned water supplies. For example, for years, U.S. health officials have said that the drinking water at North Carolina’s Camp Lejune is contaminated but poses no danger to Marines or their families. In April, the officials reversed their position, saying that their assesments contained “inaccuracies” and that a million people may have been exposed to the carcinogen benzene in their water. Over 1500 former Marines, many of whom now suffer from rare blood cancers, have filed lawsuits seeking more than $33 billion.

Here’s a rundown of other poisoned water cover-ups in American history:

Brooklyn, New York – 1800s to 1950s: In the largest petroleum spill in American history — three times bigger than the one caused by the Exxon Valdez — between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil and waste were gradually dumped from Brooklyn’s once-bustling refineries into Newtown Creek, an estuary dividing Brooklyn from Queens. In the decades since, the spill has seeped into the groundwater and now gurgles under a 55-acre swath of the Greenpoint neighborhood. While the area’s drinking water comes from distant reservoirs, benzene-laced sludge is slowly making its way to the surface. The cleanup remains only half complete.

Niagra Falls, New York – 1950s to 1970s: Why would Hooker Chemical sell the charming Love Canal neighborhood to the city of Niagara Falls for just $1? Perhaps because Hooker had used the canal as a dumping site for 20,000 tons of its waste. When the city built low-income housing and a school on the buried canal and its surrounding land, it failed to warn citizens about the mountain of poison beneath them. Soon, children were coming home with chemical burns, women passed poison on to their children through breast milk, and neurological problems and cancer rates rose sharply. In 1979, the EPA called the town’s miscarriage rate “disturbingly high.” Eventually forced to intervene, the federal government relocated all 800 Love Canal families.

Woburn, Massachusetts – 1964 to 1979: In the mid-1970s, when children in East Woburn began dying of leukemia at unusually high rates, parents correctly feared tainted groundwater. Since the 1960s, workers at a W. R. Grace & Co. Cryovac food-packaging facility had been dumping waste trichloroethylene, a toxic solvent, onto the ground behind the plant. And Beatrice Foods, which owned a local tannery, was storing 55-gallon drums of waste near the Aberjona River. Seven families sued, and a notoriously loopy trial (documented in the book A Civil Action) saw Beatrice acquitted and Grace fined only $8 million, most of which went to legal fees.

Hinkley, California – 1970s to 1980s: A small town near natural-gas pipelines in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Hinkley was the perfect place for one of Pacific Gas and Electric’s compressor stations. The company began storing cooling-tower water in unlined ponds, assuring residents that the hexavalent chromium added to the water to prevent rust was safe for consumption. But when the chromium leached into the groundwater, Hinkley citizens began experiencing a number of ailments, including cancers and birth defects. In 1993, with the help of a legal clerk named Erin Brockovich, the townspeople sued and won $333 million in damages.

Washington, D.C – 2001 to 2004: Washington’s Water and Sewage Authority became aware that dangerous amounts of lead had seeped into the city’s drinking water. The water authority hid its findings until a 2004 Washington Post article exposed the elevated lead levels. Along with many others, a father of twin boys exposed to the contaminated water is now suing the WASA for $200 million, alleging that problems associated with his sons’ lead poisoning costs his family upwards of $40,000 per year.

Don’t be a victim of the next big poisoned water cover-up. Invest in a home water filter today!

By the way, the real Erin Brockovich recently commented on a new book about genetically modified foods and how they’re making people sick, The Unhealthy Truth by Robyn O’Brien: “In the absence of the truth, all of us stand helpless to defend ourselves, our families and our health, which is the greatest gift we have. Robyn O’Brien’s courageous pursuit of The Unhealthy Truth is an example of how we can all do our parts to protect the health of our families.” I actually interviewed Robyn O’Brien a few months ago! If you’re interested, you can read the interview here: How One Mother Uncovered the Unhealthy Truth about Our Food.

Last month stephen Colbert interviewed Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times reporter who wrote the article It’s Time to Learn from Frogs. In the article, Kristof explains that waterborne animals are starting to develop bizarre deformities. Frogs, salamanders, and amphibians are sprouting extra legs. Male alligators are developing stunted genitals. And in the Potomac River, male smallmouth bass fish are producing eggs in their testes!

“This column is too depressing for words,” said Colbert when Kristof appeared on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

“What we’re seeing with all kinds of water animals (that live in the same water that we end up drinking) is that their genitals develop malformations, especially in young males,” said Kristof. “In the Potomac River, the male smallmouth bass (100 percent in some areas) actually are producing eggs. They’re called intersex fish. We’re seeing the same phenomenon with amphibians – with both frogs and salamanders – and also with alligators.”

“Let me be the pollutions advocate for a second here,” said Colbert. “Maybe you’re looking at the dark side of this. Isn’t the brighter side of this that there are still fish in the Potamac River?”

“But we’re also seeing the same phenomenon in humans now, to a lesser extent,” explained Kristof. “Male fetuses now increasingly have some of the same genital malformations. In particular, for example, the proportion of males with undescended testicles has been increasing significantly – 7 percent in the latest study.

“The culprit is a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. Essentially they mimic estrogen. and so when a fetus is forming in the first trimester of pregnancy, when males are being differentiated from females, then all this estrogen is rushing in and inhibiting the formation of the males and their genitals.

“It’s coming from a range of sources – from agricultural sources, from pesticides, from herbicides,from industry – the chemicals used to soften plastics, for example. A pregnant woman, for example, who uses soft plastic – women who have more of that chemical in their urine, their babies are significantly more likely to have these deformations in the genitals. Twenty-five percent of American women actually now have a level in their bodies that does raise problems for their offspring.

“We need to get the EPA and the government to begin regulating. So far there is not a single chemical, not a single one of these endocrine disruptors that has been regulated, that has been curbed, because of these effects.

“What we’re seeing in fact is that those areas of the water, for example, of the rivers that have more these endocrine disruptors produce more of these intersex fish and more of these frogs that are producing extra limbs.

“Women who have more of these in their bloodstream and in their urine are more likely to have fetuses that are deformed.”

In another blog post, we reported that 93 precent of Americans have BPA in their bloodstream.

Scary stuff! I’m glad I have a water filter in my kitchen! If you want to regulate the level of toxic chemicals in your water, you have to do it yourself.