1 . Remember boiling tap water for drinking? Who has the time now? Instead, bottled water is everywhere, in offices, airplanes, stores, homes and restaurants. But what’s in that bottle? Beautiful names and labels depicting romantic scenes have convinced us that the liquid is the purest drink around. But given the lack of labeling requirements for bottled water, how much do consumers really know about what’s in the bottle? “The public should not assume that water purchased in a bottle, is better regulated purer, or safer than most tap water. Water utilities are required to tell the public more about the tap water than bottled water companies are,” says Mae Wu, a bottled water (expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit organization in the US devoted to protecting health and the environment. Sure, some bottled water comes from sparkling springs and other, sources. But in the US, alone, more than 25 percent of it comes from a municipal (市政的) supply. The water is treated, purified and sold to us, often at a thousand fold increase in price. Most people are surprised to learn that they are drinking glorified tap water, but bottlers aren’t required to list the source on the label.

According to the Asian Bottled Water Association, water from municipal supply does not have to state on its label that it is from a community water system. However, there are some brands like Nestle Pure Life that indicate whether the water comes from public, private or deep well sources. Advertising can be misleading at best and deceptive at worst. In a recent case, a food and drink manufacturer boasted in a TV commercial that its mineral water came from a “high-quality water source” but it turned out that, that was no more than plain tap water.

The potential health risks are important to understand, but bottled water also affects the health of the planet. While we struggle to, cut down on our consumption of fossil fuels, bottled water increases it. Virgin petroleum (石油) is used to make PET, and the more bottles we use, the more virgin petroleum will be needed to create new bottles. Fossil fuels are burned to fill the bottles and distribute them. Some brands of water come from islands and countries thousands of kilometers away, and shipping bottles can cause carbon pollution to spill into the water and spew into the air.

2 . Friday night lights are good for the game, but they may be bad for biodiversity.

According to a study published Friday in the journal Animal Conservation, bright stadium lighting could affect the feeding habits of bats. Insects swarm (涌往) to these lights in large numbers, creating a competitive advantage for bat species who aren’t afraid of humans and human structures. This could impact local ecosystems and reduce biodiversity.

For most humans, there simply isn’t enough daylight hours—we have been developing new ways to light the night since we first controlled and used fire. But researchers say our need for continuous visibility can have serious consequences for neighboring species.

Light pollution has been linked to some ecosystem damage. Baby turtles, for example, naturally use the light of the moon to travel towards the open ocean. But constant and poorly designed artificial lighting can affect their sense of direction, obviously disturbing their life cycles.

“Increasing light pollution is a major feature of global change that’s caused by humans, and it is a potential threat to biodiversity,” co-author M. Corrie Schoeman said in a press release.

Dr Schoeman, a professor of biology at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, conducted field experiments to determine how stadium lighting affected bat behaviors. He found that “urban exploiter” bats were drawn to hunt near bright lights, while “urban avoider” bats were not. Exploiter species are able to take advantage of human resources, such as artificial light. Avoider species, by comparison, tend to avoid humans and human structures.

But it’s hardly survival of the fittest. This man-made, ecological scale-tipping could result in the decline or loss of avoider species. And that, in turn, could threaten the balance of local ecosystems.

Luckily, light pollution is considered an “easy fix” compared to other forms of pollution. Smart lighting design— hooded (带罩的) streetlamps，motion-sensitive residential lights (触控住宅用灯), and better controls to remove unnecessary brightness—can obviously reduce light pollution. As for stadium lights, earlier games could do a lot of good, both for bats and for our ecosystems as a whole.

3 . If you wear contact lenses (隐形眼镜), you might not know the best way to deal with old ones. Washing them down the sink or flushing them down the toilet is not the way to go. Yet one in five people who wear contact lenses do just that. However, the plastic in their lenses can linger (存留), polluting both water and land.

Rolf Halden, an engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his team created an online survey. More than 400 contact lens wearers took part. The questions asked how many got rid of their lenses inappropriately. About 20 percent — one in five — sent their used contact lenses down sink drain or toilet. Assuming all contact lens wearers in the U. S. do that at the same rate, the researchers then calculated how much plastic would be flushed away each year. Their estimate: 6 to 10 metric tons! That's about the weight of two to three adult African forest elephants. Contact lenses are a tiny part of the world's plastic pollution. But the unique plastic used in contact lenses could make them a big concern.

To figure it out, researchers exposed contact lenses to the microbes (微生物) used to clean wastewater in water-treatment plants. These microbes made the plastics begin to fall apart, but they weren't fully broken down. Instead, they created a lot of tiny pieces called microplastics.

Halden worries that these small plastic bits will cause trouble in the food chain. In water, the plastics from contact lenses sink. Animals could view these tiny bits as food. But because the plastic won't provide them with nutrition, this could threaten the health of animals who dined on it.

And that's already happening. Many studies have shown that corals, larval fish and shellfish are mistaking microplastics for food. Over time, they risk accumulating even higher levels of plastic in their bodies. Also the pollution has already shown up in bottled water, sea salt and fish sold for human consumption.