27/02/2012 By Chris Cook
Water is fairly commonplace stuff; we're used to seeing it every day, especially those of us who live in Britain with all the rain we get! Most of us barely ever think about how weird and wonderful water is. Without water being a "strange" chemical, life would simply not exist in its present form.
Bizarrely, water is less dense when it's frozen. What's so weird about that? Well, chemically speaking most liquids become more dense as they get colder, water doesn't, and this makes it very strange. This unusual property of water means that ice floats and if ice didn't float, our oceans would be frozen solid from the bottom up!
Did you know you can super-cool water? You can actually cool water to below 0 degrees, the point at which water would normally freeze, you don't need salt, you don't need to change air pressure or anything like that; providing your water is pure you can cool it to below zero. This is because water needs a "nucleation point" basically a "trigger" before it will freeze. If you put sufficiently pure water in a freezer when you take it out and give it a shake you can watch it instantly freeze before your eyes! Try it!
Also, hot water, can, under certain conditions, freeze faster than cold water!
As you can see, we sell a very strange product!
© 2012 Office Water Coolers
Consider this; recycling a single large plastic bottle (made
from PET) conserves enough energy to light a 60 watt bulb for 6 hours. The National
Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) reported that in 2010 1.5
billion pounds of PET was recycled in America.
Recycled PET (rPET) can be made into all sorts of things like car parts,
playground equipment, carpet or even clothing.
Now consider this; in America (and I daresay the figures are
not that dissimilar in the UK) plastic bottles ...
read more
Good news for the bottled water industry as it reports a 2.8%
increase in sales in 2011 (1.8 billion litres). As an industry that employs two
thousand people it is good news in these economically trying times as the UK officially
enters a double dip recession. So with unemployment remaining high and when
people are cutting back on so much, saving their pennies, why does the bottled
water industry grow when compared to 2010.
Well it seems there are a lot of other factors at play.
UK households ...
read more
Flamboyant Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, has started
announcing more price caps as part of his government’s Law of Fair Prices,
passed back in November 2011. The law was designed to limit what is seen as
excessive profiteering on 19 household goods and groceries but is now being
expanded as the government announce new prices for different products and it is
starting with bottled water and deodorant.
The books of over 16,000 companies have been examined by
the Venezuelan government so far ...
read more
What is polyethylene terephthalate? Well chances are you’ve
encountered it already today if you’ve swigged from a bottle of water or any of
a whole range of bottled drinks. Abbreviated to PET, polyethylene terephthalate
is probably most associated with the packaging for plastic bottles due to its
properties as an excellent and durable barrier material. The thermoplastic
polymer is part of the polyester family and can exist in both amorphous
(transparent) and as a semicrystalline polymer which ...
read more