Hello, my name is Bruce Doran and I'm one of the Staff Scientists that works here, at
Science North on the 3rd floor and what I want to do is talk about some of the green
initiatives that Science North is currently doing in order to help improve our environment
and to minimize our impact on the environment.
You might have seen some of these different green initiatives here, how we decrease our
power usage through the use of different technologies such as LED lights.
One I want to talk about it this apparatus right here, which is called a hydration station
and you might ask "why is this a green initiative?".
Well, the hydration stations have actually been set up so that visitors would use them
instead of actually buying water bottles.
What's really neat with these hydration stations is that you can use them just like a normal
water fountain, where you press the buttons and the water comes out, or you can actually
use them and fill up a water bottle, just like you would do with any other water bottle.
Also, what's really neat with these hydration stations is that they have a refrigeration
unit and a filter to make the water nice and cool and more palable to people.
Another interesting feature with these hydration stations is that they have this number right
here that actually indicate the number of water bottles that we actually saved from
using this hydration station.
So, you might ask "Why is that important?"
"What's so bad about using water bottles?"
Well, let's take a closer look at that now.
So, let's take all my water from these water bottles or water bottles like the ones we
have in front of me and on average a human and adult human will drink about 2 litres
or about 4 bottles per day and I would end up drinking about, water for about 1500 bottles.
That's a lot of bottles wasted, just from myself.
Now, you might think: "Well, it's no big deal because we can recycle bottles."
In Ontario, we throw out about a billion bottles per year and only about 30%, 3 bottles out
of 10 here are actually recycled.
Most of them end up in landfill sites or end up in the environment, in lakes and rivers
and ditches.
So, that's a lot of garbage.
Also, what people don't understand is that you can only recycle plastic a certain number
of times and eventually you can take these and recycle them to make materials such as
fleece blankets or sweaters, which are great but then you can't recycle these and they
end up in landfill.
So, if we can limit the amount of plastic that we use, we can limit the amount of plastic
that ends up in landfill.
The other issue that people don't realize is that in order to make a plastic bottle,
you need to use a lot of oil and water to do this.
In order to convert the oil into plastic, you need about 1.5 litres of water in order
to create this bottle.
This bottle that will hold the water.
So, right there that doesn't make any sense.
And also you're using fossil fuels to transport the water to the store and then transporting
back to your house, which again, does not make any sense.
Especially since we can get water directly out of our tap.
Let's take a closer look at that.
So, there's several reasons why people tell me why they take water from a bottle instead
of a tap.
One of the reasons is that most people think that water coming from a bottle actually tastes
better than from a tap.
What's really interesting is, here at Science North during our summer programming, we actually
do taste testing, where's people drink tap water and bottled water.
The interesting results that we get, although they're not scientifically accurate, but from
general results, we noticed that people can't tell the difference, generally between tap
water and bottled water, which is really, really interesting and they didn't necessarily
find that bottled water tasted better than tap water.
Another reason why people tend to also like water bottles is because they don't like the
chlorine taste of tap water.
Well, there's an easy fix for that, well, there's two easy fixes.
One, you can use a filter, like a Brita filter or whatever to remove the chlorine but another
method is you can actually just take tap water, put it in a jug and then put it overnight
in your fridge and the chlorine will just evaporate in 24 hours and then you don't get
that chlorine taste.
So, again, it doesn't really make any sense to take bottled water when you can just get
it from the tap.
Another reason people think bottled water is better than tap water is they think it's
safer than tap water.
Now, bottled water is inspected... but it is not as inspected as stringently as tap
water.
In fact, in Ontario, we have the tightest rules when it comes to tap water and municipal
water systems are tested every week for a whole bunch of perimeters, whereas bottled
water are not tested as much.
So, in Ontario, in fact, tap water is just as safe, if not safer than bottled water.
The last reason why people tend to, I find very strange that they take bottled water
is they think that bottled water is actually cheap.
They might look at this bottle and say: "Well, it only costs a dollar."
But, it's actually quite expensive considering that what's coming out of your tap only costs
about a tenth to a hundredth what you get from here.
So, to give you an idea: If I were to pull out a cellphone right here, a cellphone that
people buy and things like that and you buy this cellphone for a hundred bucks, if we
were to compare with bottled water and tap water, it would be as if we're buying a cell
phone for a hundred grand.
In other words, I'm paying about thousand times more for something that I can get out
of the tap very easily.
So, it just goes to show you that, in fact, what comes out of the tap is cheap, clean
and in most cases, tastes just as good, if not better than bottled water.
So, I hope with this video that you'll gain a greater appreciation of our hydration stations
and when you come to Science North, take a look at them and actually use them.
It's one of our initiatives here at Science North to try to decrease water bottle usage
and also throwing these out.
So, next time you're here at Science North and you're thirsty, please use them and drink
up!