You can never really say enough about everything that's wrong with bottled water (which, by the way, adheres to lower safety standards than what comes out of your tap-– sorry, couldn’t resist!). But when it comes to drugs in the water, what strikes me as most interesting is what we know the least about: What do these tiny, tiny amounts of drugs mean to us humans?

"The dose makes the poison" is a mantra I hear constantly from public health experts (as well as my editors)– and it's worth considering. In other words: just because something exists does not mean it's affecting you. It's likely we're exposed to far more toxins in the act of, say, applying nail polish, or pumping a tank of gas, than we'll imbibe over a lifetime of drinking tap water. But it'll be interesting to watch this play out over the next decade or so, as scientists on all sides of the debate try and figure out what exactly effect our environment-– pharmaceuticals, nail polish, plastics, and countless other everyday substances– is having on us.

Listen to the Drugs In Our Drinking Water Radio report online.

Low winter light over the town of Iqaluit,
the capitol of Nunavut,Canada. Photo by Bill Semple,
architect and senior researcher at the Canada Mortgage
and Housing Corporation.

Among home performance professionals, we also call the systemic approach, the whole house approach. For example, we think it is best to retrofit your home to make it more energy efficient before you invest in an expensive solar electric, or PV, system. You can buy a smaller PV system that way, and draw less energy from the electric grid. We think you should switch to CFL bulbs right now, buy Energy Star appliances when you need new appliances, and before the next hot summer have a home performance professional air seal your attic and add insulation. Make sure the contractor checks to see if you have proper ventilation in your home after air sealing-otherwise your gas appliances may back draft nasty things like carbon monoxide into your living spaces. Don't go out and buy new windows, no matter what the advertisers tell you, until your old windows are worn out. In other words, do it all, but when the time is right.

There is a debate going on in our country about how to solve our energy and environmental problems. Some say corn ethanol is the answer; others say it's cellulosic ethanol. Some say wind energy and some say solar energy; some say more government regulation is the answer and some say let the free market decide. These either/or approaches are wrong in my book. The more we are divided in our passion to solve our problems, the less likely we are able to solve them. The best-built homes are the ones in which all the parts-building site, building envelope, walls, foundation, attic, roof, HVAC system, appliances, lighting, and people-work in harmony and are most adaptable to change.

Tom Friedman also said in his talk at Berkeley Lab that writing in blogs about solving our energy problems is not enough. In our March/April 2008 issue of Home Energy we will publish a story about home building in the far north of Canada, within the Arctic Circle. The Inuit people who live there are already building to adapt to the climate change that is already occurring, as well as preparing for more climate change in the future. They are building homes that are culturally appropriate. They are also building in a way that will reduce as much as possible the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. Amen to that! Amen to the systematic approach!

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

You may listen to the "Super Laser" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also don't miss our behind-the-scenes photos for this report.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

latitude: 37.6871, longitude: -121.697

The typical dose of mercury in a CFL is about the size
of a pen tip (circled in red), and these doses
have been getting smaller and smaller.
(Photo provided by EPA.)Australia has already begun to phase out the incandescent light bulb, and the energy legislation recently signed by President Bush has begun that process in the United States. Every time I turn around, it seems, someone is handing me a brand new compact fluorescent light (CFL) to advance the cause of energy efficiency and help save the planet. CFLs are becoming ubiquitous in households all over California. We taught them in the pages of Home Energy all the time. And that's a good thing, right?

Brandy Bridges, of Ellsworth, Maine may not think so. A cleaning company quoted her a price of $2,000 to clean her house after she broke a CFL.

The benefits of CFLs are many–they use about 75% less energy than incandescents and last up to ten times longer. Replacing a 75W incandescent with an 18W CFL will save you about $46 in electricity costs over the life of the bulb, and that is at current electricity prices, which no doubt will go up, making today's CFLs an even better deal. Energy Star CFLs (www.energystar.gov/cfls) won't flicker, give warmer light, and there are a variety of them, from the ubiquitous A-line bulb, to candelabras.

But, and it's a big but, CFLs won't give light without mercury. The average CFL on the shelf at your local hardware store has about 4 mg of mercury in it. Mercury vapor is harmful to humans, and there is enough mercury accumulated in some of the fish we eat to make this Californian think twice about ordering salmon for dinner.

Thankfully, there are ways to clean up a broken CFL that don't involve an overly frightened and/or greedy cleaning company (www.epa.gov/CFLcleanup), and recycling centers are available, if not yet ubiquitous (that word again!) (www.lamprecycle.org).

Even if the worst happens and you break a CFL bulb, the EPA estimates that at most only 6.8% of the 4 mg of mercury will be released, or about 0.27 mg, since most of it is in the glass, electrodes, and in the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. Incinerating a bulb will potentially release more mercury vapor, if there are no pollution controls on the incinerator.

But even if the CFL released all of it’s mercury–according to Richard Benware, a graduate student at Cornell who researched CFLs last summer for EPA's Energy Star program–it would still be a better choice than an incandescent, because over its lifetime, the 15W CFL will have prevented the release of 5.67 mg of mercury from an average power plant.

Of course, recycling is best, and that is still a problem. Alan Meier, Home Energy's senior executive editor, admits to turning part of his garage into a "temporary hazardous waste holding facility" to hold his family’s used CFLs, since the nearest CFL recycling center is 13 miles away from his home in Berkeley, through "one of the worst traffic jams in the United States." There is help in finding those recycling centers, near and far (www.earth911.org). But we need to put the same effort used in making CFLs ubiquitous into making disposing of them in a clean safe manner just as ubiquitously easy.

You know what I mean.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

latitude 37.8686, longitude -122.267

You may listen to the "Relaxing the Rules on Toxic Reporting" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.