ecobites.com

Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Your expensive bottled water may have come from a well in an industrial facility parking lot or a polluted creek down the road. In fact, up to 40 percent of bottled water is bottled tap water that may or may not have received additional treatment.

It gets worse - the metal antimony and heavy metals has been found in many bottled water brands. One study that looked at over 60 brands of bottled water produced in Europe and Canada found concentrations of antimony that were more than

100 times the typical level found in clean groundwater (2 parts per trillion). It also found that the longer a bottle of water sits on a shelf -- in a grocery store or your refrigerator -- the greater the dose of antimony present.

The biggest offenders were packaged in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers, which are the bottles typically

Step by step we are becoming greener. We are making an effort to run more eco-friendly homes, while offices, companies and other places of business, like the Hearst Tower in New York City, use energy-conserving appliances, air conditioning, and heating units.

Happily, schools are the next institution to turn green. Since 2000, nearly 100 public and private schools have been certified as eco-friendly by the U.S. Green Building Council, according to an article in USA Today.

ScienceDaily (July 8, 2008) — Four weeks since the shocking incident that led to the death of 26 dolphins near Falmouth, research sheds new light on the extent of the problems facing Cornwall's marine mammals. 

The frequency of these mammals, collectively known as cetaceans, found stranded on beaches in Cornwall has increased with a sharp rise in the last eight years. After analysing nearly 100 years of data, the researchers believe this could, in part, be due to more intensive fishing.

June 2008. Earthwatch scientist Ricardo Sagarminaga van Buiten, who is studying common dolphin and marine turtles in the Alboran Sea, says, "The longlining season has just begun and we have another period ahead of us that could be disastrous for the endangered loggerhead turtle populations that travel and feed in the south-west Mediterranean. We can expect that around 20,000 will end up getting caught on Spanish fleet longlining hooks alone."

Australian Permaculture is more than just organic gardening. Read how a sustainable permaculture garden was created on a rocky inner-city hill slope in Tropical Australia.

Our story - 'In Townsville we lived in a house on a city block of 540m2. Even though it was right in the very centre of a city with 150,000 inhabitants, the wildlife in our garden was amazing: possums, fruit bats, large goannas, snakes, lizards, tropical birds and much more. 

In this old part of Townsville many houses are perched on hill sides.