Wellington cafes embrace plastic pollution cutting scheme allowing thirsty Kiwis free water bottle refills Thirsty residents can take their drink bottles into any cafe on board with the scheme for a free water top up.
Source: Facebook/ Refill NZ A scheme in Wellington is attempting to lead the way in cutting plastic pollution, giving thirsty residents options to fill their reusable water bottles for free, with cafes eager to get on board.
Jill Ford of RefillNZ said after travelling and seeing "the impact of plastic from deserts in Morocco to coral reefs in Colombia I decided to start Refill in New Zealand".
"We now have volunteers and cafes from around New Zealand contacting us to spread the word or sign up their cafes, these spread from Whitianga to Wanaka, with real keen beans in the Hawke’s Bay and Dunedin, so it’s all go."
"The next stage is that we’ve now got some funding from community trust of wellington which means we can start doing some paid social media marketing to get the word out.
She estimated 70-80 businesses were on board around the Wellington region.
Ms Ford said extending the idea to New Zealand came about after she worked on a plastic campaign with the organisation that created Refill in Britain.
"Then after (BBC nature documentary) Blue Planet came out [the company] Water England decided to contract them to go much bigger, and now it’s huge and is throughout the UK with over 15,000 businesses involved."
Councils and DHBs in the region are also said to be interested in the scheme, Ms Ford said.
"They are into the health benefits of drinking water, because of the diabetes epidemic New Zealand is facing which is closely linked to high sugar intakes."

Michigan businesses are discharging large amounts of chemical contaminants into the state’s waterways every day, according to a newspaper investigation.
MLive.com obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that show that 16 of the plants received written orders over the past year to reduce industrial sources of perfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, found in their discharges.
Exposure to PFAS has been linked in epidemiological studies to some cancers, thyroid disorders, low birth weights, elevated cholesterol and other chronic diseases.
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#ReadLocal At least 130 businesses have been considered as potential sources of PFAS.
"We haven’t used it in almost six years," Lacks Enterprises CEO Nick Hrynyk said of the chemicals.
"But it’s still there because it just clings."
The highest recorded discharge level was 240,000-ppt of PFAS from Bronson Plating to the Bronson wastewater plant, which is about 25 miles south of Battle Creek.
Teresa Seidel, director of the Water Resources Division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said the state is working to stop contamination from both manufacturers and the treatment plants.
"We’re seeing that from everyone we’ve asked to step forward and work on this."

Checks for radioactive contamination found none on them.
Shortly after 7 p.m. the hose connection apparently failed, leaking water that was potentially contaminated with radioactive and chemical waste onto the floor and spraying the workers.
The water was found to be contaminated with cleaning solutions and chemicals.
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The Liquid Effluent Retention Facility, which stores contaminated water until it can be sent to the nearby Effluent Treatment Facility at Hanford, can hold 23 million gallons of water.
The Effluent Treatment Facility in the center of the site treats high volumes of waste water contaminated with low levels of radioactive and hazardous chemical contaminants.
Two workers were accidentally sprayed with potentially contaminated water Wednesday evening at the Effluent Treatment Facility.
The Effluent Treatment Facility in central Hanford treats up to 28 million gallons of water each year.
Courtesy Department of Energy Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions has operated the Effluent Treatment Facility since 2015.
Annette Cary; 509-582-1533; @HanfordNews

Dawn Mayberry has lived in High Springs for six years and never drinks the water or allows her family to bath in it.
“The water smells like bleach as soon as you turn it on,” Mayberry said.
Mayberry now bathes her daughter at her mother’s home in Newberry.
“In the past, High Springs has had issues with water contaminants,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman explained that boil water notices don’t necessarily mean the water is contaminated.
However, the problem is not limited to the boil water notices.
But, Russell Simpson, the FDEP Northeast District Ombudsman, said High Springs has certainly encountered water safety concerns in the past, specifically with disinfection byproducts (DBP), contaminants used to disinfect water.
The state sets maximum contaminant levels (MCL) for disinfection byproducts.
High Springs was in violation of all state levels set for disinfection byproducts in 2016, but improved to just one violation in 2017.
It also exceeded the state’s maximum level for Haloacetic Acid (HAA5) by 23.94 ppb in 2016, but brought the average within legal levels in 2017.

After reviewing the proposed Chemours Consent Order, it’s clear why the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality released the news on Nov. 21.
WaterPIO is currently working for Belville, assisting with its efforts to complete a groundwater reverse-osmosis plant.
We also are helping the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority with communications under a short-term agreement.
On Wednesday, CFPUA made public a report prepared for Chemours that shows PFAS was still entering the Cape Fear River around the plant this summer.
Contamination jumped from 77.7 parts-per-trillion above the Fayetteville plant to 207.1 parts-per-trillion below it.
This highlights the glaring problem with the proposed consent order — it would give Chemours valuable cover for its past pollution.
4 — making 300,000 people living in the Lower Cape Fear Region whole by paying to clean up their tainted drinking water.
That leads us to the people who lose out the most under this agreement: Our region’s water utilities and their customers.
Chemours made a profit of $765 million last year and an estimated $275 million last quarter.
The deadline for public comment is Dec. 21.

MULTAN: The World Health Organisation has established 10 micrograms per litre as the permissible concentration in drinking water while Multan district is stated to have 50 micrograms per litre arsenic in underground water which is five times higher than permissible, according to a report of Public Health Engineering (PHE).
Arsenic is a chemical element, the elevated levels of which may cause different deadly diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular problems and various types of cancer.
Moreover, early childhood exposure has been linked to negative impacts on cerebral development that leads to increasing deaths in young adults.
However, what the authority termed the lack of requisite resources, was halting maintenance of filtration plants up to the desired level.
“The department is able to look after all filtration plants by two monitoring officials only with single motorbike,” according to secretary of water testing laboratory Khalid Javed.
He also pointed out that although water testing laboratory offers free of cost water testing for common households of the city yet the latter least come up to acquire the service.
The rapid expansion of the local population through unplanned colonies structure has worsened the situation as the builders don’t pay heed to situation of underground sewer system network where the dirty water is getting mixed up with drinking water so that the authority could adopt alternative measures to revert the hazard on time, said the PHE report.
Water Xen [executive engineer] Abudsslam, however, didn’t agree with the report, saying that Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) has so far able to manage pure water for larger parts of city by extending a strong net of underground water pipelines.
“We use to conduct TPV (third party valuation) of water after every three-week here to ensure purity of drinking water, he said.
According to a web link, in US and European countries, the maximum contamination level for arsenic in drinking water is lowered by using alternative methods of using membrane filtration of arsenic from drinking water.

LANSING — After nearly two years, a Michigan House bill that would require schools and day cares to test for lead in their water, and help them pay for testing and remediation, has finally cleared committee.
House Bill 4124, introduced by State Rep. Sheldon Neeley, D-Flint, was passed by the Michigan State House’s Committee of Natural Resources on Nov. 28, and could come up for a vote in the full House before the lame duck session ends on Dec. 31.
Mandatory testing for lead and other contaminants in schools is rare in the United States, with only eight states currently requiring it.
All other schools test on a voluntary basis, which many did after the Flint water crisis.
Sixteen percent didn’t know if they had tested.
Neeley’s bill, which was introduced in January 2017 as part of a larger legislative package on water quality testing, didn’t have a committee hearing until June 2018.
In the meantime, another bill that would require water suppliers to schools and day cares to test for lead was introduced in September.
“It has been four years since the beginning of a water crisis in my city, the signs of which can still be seen clearly throughout our community,” Neeley said in June.
“The people of Flint are still under a public health emergency and are advised to boil their water before using it.
Schools and child care centers throughout the city rely on bottled water to get through the day.

Michigan businesses are discharging large amounts of chemical contaminants into the state’s waterways every day, according to a newspaper investigation.
MLive.com obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that show that 16 of the plants received written orders over the past year to reduce industrial sources of perfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, found in their discharges.
Exposure to PFAS has been linked in epidemiological studies to some cancers, thyroid disorders, low birth weights, elevated cholesterol and other chronic diseases.
Premium content for only $0.99 For the most comprehensive local coverage, subscribe today.
#ReadLocal At least 130 businesses have been considered as potential sources of PFAS.
"We haven’t used it in almost six years," Lacks Enterprises CEO Nick Hrynyk said of the chemicals.
"But it’s still there because it just clings."
The highest recorded discharge level was 240,000-ppt of PFAS from Bronson Plating to the Bronson wastewater plant, which is about 25 miles south of Battle Creek.
Teresa Seidel, director of the Water Resources Division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said the state is working to stop contamination from both manufacturers and the treatment plants.
"We’re seeing that from everyone we’ve asked to step forward and work on this."

The public schools in Flint, Michigan, may now have safe drinking water, but the faucets have been turned off in Detroit since the beginning of the school year.
The water fountains in all 106 schools run by the Detroit Public Schools Community District have been dry since classes began in August.
The superintendent ordered them shut off as a pre-emptive measure, after testing revealed elevated levels of copper and lead in drinking water at some schools.
It’s a pretty frightening scenario for many residents of Detroit — a city just 60 miles southeast of Flint, where residents kept getting sick in 2016, even though officials insisted that the drinking water was just fine.
Now, look at the water here.
They should have known it was going to be a problem with this old infrastructure.” And yet Detroit is far from the only school district to have problems with water quality.
At the beginning of this school year, several Maryland school districts also found lead in their drinking water and turned off their water fountains.
The Detroit Press gives this rundown on school districts around the country dealing with water issues: The nation’s 14th largest school district, Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, is being forced to replace hundreds of fixtures after finding elevated levels of lead earlier this year.
Elevated levels of lead were found in 61 percent of the schools.
As a public school teacher, I’m ashamed that I didn’t know this before — but here’s what really wrong: “No federal law requires testing of drinking water for lead in schools that receive water from public water systems, although these systems are regulated by the EPA,” the Government Accountability Office reported in a 2017 survey.

WaterAid’s Jonathan Farr says the latest IPCC report highlights the importance of adaptation, and business has a crucial role to play Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its report on the challenges of limiting global warming to a more ambitious 1.5°C rather than 2°C, and the consequences of exceeding it.
It made stark warnings that highlight the need to urgently cut carbon pollution, and spelled out the threat to the world’s water.
The IPCC’s report makes it clear that a minimum of 1.5°C increase is locked in, and some have even dubbed that figure as “magical thinking”.
There have been positive signs around carbon reduction, with the breath-taking switch to renewable energy from fossil fuels not only cutting pollution but dramatically reducing water use too, but the cuts still aren’t happening fast enough.
HSBC has been working with Earthwatch, WaterAid and WWF to support projects that conserve clean water source Some companies are already taking action.
Climate resilience is a core part of WaterAid’s work with HSBC in Bangladesh, building climate-resilient clean water supplies in places like Dacope, where water supplies are depleting as a result of climate change, while improving the quality and accessibility of water sources.
Diageo, Gap Inc and Unilever worked with WaterAid to develop a Business Case for WASH,a guide to help companies understand and measure the economic benefits of investing in water, sanitation and hygiene, and thereby make the case for further investment while also encouraging their supply chains to take action.
HSBC and WaterAid are now putting the guide into practice, with the launch of a three-year project to deliver essential water and sanitation services in apparel factories and nearby communities in Bangladesh and India operating within their supply chain.
It is transformative for communities Future-proofing in a changing climate and ensuring water resilience is important for business continuity; when companies are able to embed WASH considerations within their water strategy, this often facilitates a more holistic water management approach.
Access to safe water does not just mean avoiding tragedy, it is transformative for communities, potentially bringing healthier lives, massively increased economic prospects, and sustainable cities, towns and communities for hundreds of millions of people.