Yes, but people still buy it (and market is bound to grow, ceteris paribus) because they think tap water is worse somehow. And with crumbling public water infrastructure in many countries, that's not really far from the truth.
Do you have a source to back up the claim from your last sentence? My understanding is that if you can cook with your tap water, then it should also be safe to drink (or can be made safe to drink by boiling it). If you're worried about lead or sth else in your water supply, you might as well disconnect it from your kitchen.
Thanks! This seems to be US-specific, and I'd be interested to read about other places (the original claim was about "many countries"). Sibling comments seem to disagree, at least when it comes to Europe.
Don't talk in generic terms if it doesn't apply at all places. In Germany for example, tap water is perfectly fine. Some might not like it that much because it perhaps is too hard or something, or your house might have old pipes, but it is healthy.
Depends on the country. In some European countries tapwater is extremely well controlled and can be considered cleaner than bottled water. I wouldn't say that the contamination is unknown:
bottled water sucks ass, but how do you quantify this sort of thing? it's almost a meaningless number. after 3500 liters dispensed from a tap, is there one empty plastic bottle dumped in a landfill? or are you supposed to reuse a water bottle 3500 times before tossing it? are there 3500 times more co2 emissions from getting bottled water to my lips? last i checked there isn't much carbon involved in pulling from the ground, which isnt even how everyone gets their water. no i didnt read the article.
Well you should have. Just to answer one question: You need to move the water to the bottling plant, distribute that to the retail logistics centers and then distribute it to the retail shops.
The buyers are then also more likely to go the the shop by car, as heavy things are not great to buy when going by feet or bicycle.
Not to mention that, if you believe the typical marketing bullshit, your bottle water is probably sourced from the Alps or some stream in the arse crack of New Zealand and then transported across the globe for however long that takes, until it finds its way to a store and then to your lips.
Brita filters (or any other filters/jugs) have their own environmental costs as well but you can chug through a decent amount of tap water before you need to replace one of those. Couldn't live without one of those in Barcelona (unless I wanted to down a glass full of limestone), and was much more useful than lugging back a few huge jugs of bottled water every few days.
Back in the UK, not a single reason to buy water in a bottle unless you're outside and in a pinch.
Yeah UK water is pretty top notch as is all Australian water. I really just cannot understand or really envisage what it must be like to not have pure basically flavourless (or water flavoured??) water coming out of the tap which is 100% safe. How is it so hard to get right?
Depends on where you are. In Europe there is no need for that at all.
What kind of water filter would that be? A simple small filter you attach to the faucet or a proper arm-sized cylinder you place somewhere along your water pipes? I am not sure how well those filters remove all contaminants like heavy metals and such.
I would not classify chlorine and fluoride as the same group as heavy metals… While it sounds dangerous, it’s hard to argue there isn’t a net positive to use fluoride and chlorine to society when it comes to water distribution. Also to note, there is nothing particular special of Berkeley filters compared to other carbon filter, and it does not filter heavy metals (you typically need ion exchange filter for that). The company has a bunch of filter claims and state that they haven’t gotten the NSF certification because of cost reasons but I find it really hard to believe that is the case.
I think “disgusting” is probably too hard of a word for it, but you can taste substantial differences in tap water in Germany and whenever I move it takes a bit of time until I get used to the local flavor. Berlin is different from Munich. Volvic tastes like Volvic tastes like Volvic and I can’t quite get used to the taste of Evian.
You don't need a filter in Europe to make the water safer to drink because the tap water quality is tightly regulated and controlled, and tap-water is considered safe to drink.
I can't speak about countries outside of Europe because I don't know their regulations. That's why I said Europe.
Edit: After a bit more research I see that Western European tap water is mostly safe.
Flavour is something else of course. If a filter helps than that is great. Healthier than mixing it with lemonade or coffee.
I can’t blame Spanish people for using bottled water. Of course it’s far less sustainable but there is an history of contaminated tap water in several regions os Spain (you can check with a little research). If it is well regulated doesn’t mean that shit doesn’t happen. It seems to me that the probability that something wrong happens on open air lakes or rivers is bigger than in bottled water from spring water source.
It also seems to me that you misunderstand the real function of taste sense in your body.
Bottled water is too cheap and convenient. The people living today won't even have to deal with any real consequences to the environment. Give people a reason to care, while first accepting that, on the whole, people don't care about future generations of life on this planet.
Sadly this is the truth. Most people do not really care beyond their immediate self-interest, they will give up principles or jeopardise the future or other people for very very minor conveniences.
You need to give people a reason to care by appealing to their self-interest. The only way I can see this regarding this problem is a tax on single-use plastics to make them very expensive.
Filters are way cheaper than bottled water, by several orders of magnitude[1]. Also more convenient in my opinion, as you have filtered water literally on-tap.
If you want to make people stop using water bottles you have to improve the water going to their house.
I've been to very few places (in the US) that the water tasted good from the tap. One was a major metro, the others were places with well water.
My parents live in a medium sized Texas city that has tap water that is typically brown, sometimes it comes out of the tap foamy. Some filter it, but many just buy bottled.
I use a simple filter at home to improve taste. However, after living in hurricane and tornado prone areas, I keep a small supply of water on hand (a few cases of bottled) for emergencies.
>My parents live in a medium sized Texas city that has tap water that is typically brown, sometimes it comes out of the tap foamy
Source/pictures? I find it hard to believe such water would be allowed by the EPA. This is also strange, considering that I've been to countries without drinkable tap water (eg. you have to boil it), and the water doesn't look like that.
IIRC the problem with flint michigan water was high lead concentration, which isn't something that's as visible as the gp described. I can see how elevated lead levels can fly below the radar, but not brown water.
Might just be an issue with nearby pipes, and not something affecting the entire supply. When the municpal water pipes get cleaned around where I live, they put up signs saying that your water might be brown or rust colored for a few days, but to just let the tap run for a few seconds before you start drinking it or showering.
> If you want to make people stop using water bottles you have to improve the water going to their house.
It's not that simple. The quality isn't the cause, the cause is people's lack of trust in their water. It's not like you can just judge water quality by its color and taste.
e.g., "Drinking water from 118 of 120 (!!!) locations tested across the US had levels of PFAS or arsenic above Consumer Report's recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead." [1]
Are they taking into account the carbon footprint of the enormous yachts the Nestlé executives buy and operate with the profits from water sales in their analysis?
What about the pipe fitters union lobbying to require lead pipes decades after universal acceptance of the dangers of lead and the enormous cost to replace?
That seems like unnecessary ragebait and opens up the metric to all kinds of manipulation. eg. is microsoft office better or worse libreoffice than once you factor in that bill gates' philanthropic activities?
I think this about my government's decision to implement electricity metering in all new apartment construction. Except apartment dwellers have little control over their appliances (they're generally included), and you pay $13+/month in account fees for the individual meters.
They even tried to push this on existing apartments, but I'd have to consume 33% less than average just to break-even. Hard to do when HVAC&DHW are central and laundry is common.
So while I would have some incentive to conserve, I end up poorer and somebody else gets rich off account fees and likely lives a very wasteful life.
Then the transition to smart meters that do time-of-day billing, but its been shown to shift demand by under 1 percent. Meanwhile the thing consumes a few watts 24/7 + implementation capex. Meter-reading is now remote, but what did the meter-reader human start doing instead?
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
Title should be updated to "Bottled water is 1400–3500..." based off "Highlights" section of the actual study that cosmotic linked to. I've learned firsthand that it's counterproductive to only quote the high-end of the range. Comes off as disingenuous.
I got blind sided by an argument when visiting a friend recently because I carry a reusable water bottle with me whenever I leave home for more than a few hours whereas he brings throwaway water bottles. At one point he gestures to my bottled water and asked "does that make you feel good about yourself ?" implying I am virtue signaling.
I explained that I saw a documentary ~10 years ago where the claim was if you can do one thing for the environment, please stop purchasing bottled water. It seemed like an easy request, so why not.
I then rhetorically asked him if he "felt good" about himself because he doesn't just throw his trash out the car window, which is what we city kids (and adults) used to do in the early 80s. "No you don't do it and you don't think about it, right ? It's the same with my water bottle. I don't lecture anyone, and I honestly didn't think once about what he or others are doing."
Culture changes many times for the better. It's odd though how some people are the last to get the memo despite similar demographics.
Why is there a weird stigma about carrying around a reusable water bottle? I’ve experienced it myself when I was younger and in school. It’s something about preparing for the moment compared to just going with the flow of life. I remember being categorized, by a girl, as a pretentious nerd soley based off my water bottle choice.
Sometimes it's easier to make someone feel bad for making a better choice, than to consider the reasons why they are not making that choice themselves. Also once an mindset like being a bottled-water-family is ingrained into a person anything that runs contrary to that can seem to be almost threatening to one's own behavior.
Someone once told me you can learn everything about a person by what they do with their empty cart at the grocery store.
In school, secondary and college, I remember that you fared better socially if you figured out how to not look like you were struggling to transport all your things. People were unkind to students who had useful rolling packs, for example, as well as students who tended to have their hands full in the halls. I’d think a water bottle could play into that. However, I see my daughter and most of her friends bring them everywhere so I think that particular item is perceived differently now so long as it’s the “right” style.
> you fared better socially if you figured out how to not look like you were struggling to transport all your things
To be honest, it does look ridiculous hauling all your shit around like some hiker. It lacks grace and is out of proportion with the task at hand. This must be an American thing. I do not recall students elsewhere roaming school halls around like hobos with all their belongings.
My high school (and middle school too) was big enough that the time it took to walk from once class to my locker and the to my next class too longer than the time we had in between classes. So I had to carry a lot more shit than I wanted to. Some kids had classes and lockers in better locations. Anyhow, your attitude stinks. Let people make their own choices what they carry and don’t call them hobos without grace because you can’t understand why they might choose to carry some of their things around.
> This must be an American thing. I do not recall students elsewhere roaming school halls around like hobos with all their belongings.
(Not an American here, trying to recall something that might be wrong)
IIRC American schools have classrooms assigned to subjects. I.e. there is an English classroom and a Physics classroom and a French classroom.
So you would typically have the entire student population move between classrooms after every lesson.
This is not how my (German) school worked. Apart from a few exceptions (like the Music and Chemistry classroom), classrooms were assigned to grades. We would have Maths and English and History all in the same classroom, and only switch classrooms once or twice daily.
Yes, as other users said, it’s a consequence of short passing periods, inconveniently located lockers, and students having to move between specialized teachers every hour. I would also add that not many American schools teach in a lecture format, so students feel they need to bring textbooks and workbooks instead of just a notebook and/or computer.
A tall bottle on a table is arguably obnoxious and unsightly. I just put mine on the floor if it is in line-of-sight of too many people especially indoors.
Im as cheap as most people you will find. I bought a Sprite 2 litter bottle and after trying to drink the liquid (couldn't bc of the sweet/sugar) I rinsed it, marked it with hourly Mark's (using permanent marker) and use use it as my reusable water bottle every day . It really helps me drinking my 2 lt water every day and prevents me from using several water bottles.
It was kind of a mike drop moment. Honestly, my buddy has associated hard-right and anti-left views as part of his identity. He doesn't wear a seat belt because he doesn't want the gov't telling him what to do. That type of extreme. But he's also smart, so I suspect sometimes he says things as a cry for help, the way an alcoholic will mock you for drinking just one beer because it reminds them that they have habits they can't break or have regretfully become part of their identity.
All sorts of insecurities start to show in people when you decide to go against the grain, choose for yourself and embrace deliberate action without hiding anything. That most people tend to think it's because of trying to show off rather than a small sacrifice that you eventually stop thinking about, is sadly very telling.
It's very natural though to ask about something that is different in some way.
Not so much "afraid" (I don't think they will attack me) as "deeply disgusted", particularly by their smell, and their fouling of my foods. There are lots of reasons to hate cockroaches.
You are not sheltered - they are endemic in the UK. And if you have them, you will know the smell (human languages are notoriously bad at describing smells).
At the beginning of the year their rate was not the highest, but other groups got convinced (their rates lowered), but PhDs remained constant.
To me it means the PhDs have a high degree of confidence in their own beliefs (surely thinking they've come to their conclusions rationally and with rigorous scientific reasoning), and no push will change their minds. Whether this self-evaluation is accurate or not, is a different question. I wonder what their PhDs are even in, if it's molecular biology, then, well, maybe there's a case there, but a PhD in, say, Polynesian cultures?
My guess is that the level of education required to get a PhD instills in one an extreme level of skepticism; since most PhDs are not in genetics or virology (just simple statistics), most PhDs are skeptical of the fields from which they are not experts.
"They" here are 23.9% of PhDs. So 76.1% believe the experts. The rest are probably like other skeptics (or like most of us humans), they've come up with the conlusion and they've seen the proof that supported that conclusion and dismissed proof that don't.
Although as PhDs they should know more about confirmation bias...
i would expect MDs to have a much higher than average fax rate for that very reason. There’s a lot of really awful illnesses for which we have still very crude protections and treatments. vaccines are a godsend treated as such among all the MDs i know.
The main issue I have seen with people that work in the medical field is when they value anecdote over data. Inevitably, some that work in the field are going to have a disproportionate outcome of some type that doesn't fit the data. So if several of your patients had a bad reaction to a vaccine, you might incorrectly assume that there is an issue.
> and asked "does that make you feel good about yourself ?" implying I am virtue signaling
Is there more context to this conversation? The reason of course could've been that, but it also seems like there's a chance (not high, I admit) he might've seen the local tap water as dangerous and tried to think of a compelling reason why you would still drink it despite that. Especially if the topic has previously come up.
Beach city LA, so water quality isn't bad. As for context, he's a pathological right wing troll and we both have ADD and find mild periodic confrontation stimulating. Everyone I know mocks him for being an absurdist, but he has many friends because he's damn funny, helpful, and caring.
What about reusing containers for drinking water that you would otherwise dispose of? I've been using yogurt bottles for my drinking water for a while now.
No extra resources wasted to produce a fancy water bottle, and you don't need to worry too much if you lose it.
Doing a similar thing; I buy a bottle of plastic water (or some other soft drink) to reuse as container for tap water. I usually replace it when the plastic gets milky, every few weeks.
Yes, I refill bottled water bottles with tap water. I usually replace them once a year. Previously, I would buy whatever brand I found that was the right size for how I store them but last time I ended up spending more on Evian and the bottles are holding up much better. Poland Springs bottles use very thin plastic that crumples easily which is good for minimizing the amount of plastic used but bad for reuse.
I do wonder if, by reusing the bottles, there could be harmful chemicals leeching out.
Bottles sit on the store shelf and have a use-by date of often a year in the future. I figure if there is going to be leeching, it's not going to be significant enough in a day or two. Just to be careful though, even with my 'proper' reusable bottles I won't drink the water if it's been there more than a day or two or if it's exposed to the sun.
It's not about the water inside, it's about the plastic. I do the same as grandparent, refill disposable but sturdy bottles, I change every 6 month or so. I assume the plastic itself is shedding particles away more and more as it ages. There is a bad smell that develops after a few months. Probably from bacteria build up.
I misplace water bottles on a regular basis. So I buy bottled water and re-fill the disposable bottles until they get lost.
The article wholey ignores the costs of production for non-disposable water bottles. They absolutely take more resources to produce and you thus need to refill any given water bottle a certain number of times before you break even with disposable bottled water. For absent minded folks like me, constantly buying replacement bottles can be a worse impact on the environment.
>> For absent minded folks like me, constantly buying replacement bottles can be a worse impact on the environment.
Society doesn't and IMO shouldn't optimize for the absent-minded. Do you also loose your keys, wallet and phone on a regular basis? Maybe it's not a memory thing but more of a value thing.
I agree it's definitely value based. I've own a hydroflask which is a fairly expensive water bottle and I got it for free, so I value it pretty highly. I think I'm more likely to lose my wallet of plastic/replaceable credit cards than I am my water bottle. Plus it's just a big object, so it actually takes up (virtual?imaginary?) space in my mind.
I think the other person heard you saying "bottled water has a good purpose" and they replied "It's bad enough of a problem that we shouldn't suggest its continued use because you can't remember to care about your bottle".
This is just how I'm reading the conversation.
As others have said, maybe if you spent $15 on a purpose-built, non-BPA, reliable water bottle, you would use it less because your mind wouldn't perceive it to be disposable.
> As others have said, maybe if you spent $15 on a purpose-built, non-BPA, reliable water bottle, you would use it less because your mind wouldn't perceive it to be disposable.
You have the causality exactly backwards. It is the frequency with which I have lost expensive water bottles that caused me to stop using them in most situations.
I don't understand why people only replied to try and tell me how my brain works rather that to engage with the core idea of comment.
There were real pushes from the early 70s on to combat pollution from many sources. One thing that many Americans will remember from then (or from seeing it later) is the "Crying Indian" ad from 1971. Pollution also made it into songs about little things like the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that provided a lot of push for the passage of the Clean Water Act not long after.
America solved a large part of air and water pollution issues as a side-effect of policies which shifted production largely off-shore. That solution won't work for the remainder.
The trash problem seems to have worsened - especially in the cities. Municipal governments have eliminated street cleaning from their service portfolio and now seem to mostly rely on things getting so bad that some civil group sign on to their adopt-a-highway program and make some effort to clean things up once or twice a year. Hard to take care of the home when you're busy sending trillions to destroying people's lives in other parts of the world.
The difficulty I have in looking optimistically toward the future comes from my lack of confidence in the leadership of this nation. An entrenched two-party system and a complicit media has led us to a place where we cannot adequately provide for basic human needs (education, health, and housing). Without caring for those things for all of the people living within our borders, the hard choices we will need to make are going to bring us through a period of turmoil as the pains of adjustment are felt unevenly throughout our society. Someone is going to lose and it probably won't be the rich and upper middle class. We will likely end up covering them for the loss of their beach-side property while the poor sod living in the countryside will be treated like we currently treat our homeless.
If they were littering like that in the early 80s, their community was very much lagging behind the American culture overall. Or maybe it was just the people they were around literally being trashy.
It wasn't, and isn't today, an American thing. Plenty of countries had, and even still do have, casual attitudes about littering.
I've got news for you, none of the dishes you use, at home or when you're out are "sterile". The good news is humans don't require anything close to this; we're pretty hardy creatures.
Was the documentary "Tapped" by chance? I saw that one around that same timeframe you mentioned and it inspired me to get a reusable bottle I still use to this day.
Every so often I think about this. I use a 32 ounce insulated stainless steel bottle, no disposable bottles. However, every time I have to wash it I take note of the fact that it take several fill-swish-dump cycles to clean it. If I use soap it take even more to get it all out.
In other words, someone could make an argument that I am wasting water. I haven't quantified it yet, so I don't have a really good metric from which to judge this. I probably rinse the bottle every couple of days.
I tend to wash it more often because I switch between water and other powder-mixed drinks. When you switch you either accept the mixing and taste "pollution" or wash it. Going from something like gatorade to water does not require rinsing. I found that switching from powder-based fiber to water or gatorade does. I tend to schedule these for minimal rinsing though.
This bizarre thing is from a health perspective bottled water is toxic for you.
Plastic, especially new plastic, actually leaches compounds into water. As plastic gets old, its leaching capacity goes down. Old plastic is safer than newer plastic. However, most plastic bottles, including BPA-free are estrogenic. They are bad for men and women causing a variety of problems which are still poorly understood.
The worse use-case is plastic filled bottles, like water, that have sat or have been transported in hot environments which is to say all of them. Ditto for hot takeout food served in plastic containers - soups, curries, etc.
People who buy bottled water are literally paying money to get poisoned for a teeny bit of convenience. I know most water fountains are not cleaned properly but that water is safer (by orders of magnitudes, but I have no data to cite) than bottled water.
A lot of this is problematic for the evidence driven folks. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but please use the precautionary principle.
I live in a hundred-year-old apartment building that is not the best maintained. I have no idea about the condition of the pipes and I don’t know where my water is coming from. I can get a filter, but I feel like it’s similar to running my own email server. Sure, I could do it, but I’d rather put the burden of filtering (and quality control in general) on a 3rd party.
You could get your water tested if you're concerned.
ADDED: I don't mean this facetiously. Even if I drank bottled water rather than tap water (which I don't in general), I definitely would want to know if I suspected my tap water wasn't potable for some reason.
It’s not as easy or straightforward to test drinking water. I tried and failed at Amsterdam, NL just last week. There is no easy reliable test for drinking water quality( one that tests for common bacteria, heavy metals, minerals and soluble pollutants). The only tests I could find were all lead tests, but that is just of my many concerns.
The last place I lived had over 300 ppm water. The landlord was useless at maintaining the building-wide softener, so I just installed an under-sink RO system myself. It worked wonders. In my new place the water isn't nearly as hard, but still tastes slightly off. I'll be installing an RO system here as well.
You get roughly the same number if you compare the cost of tap water and bottled water per gallon. Monetary cost is a pretty good rule-of-thumb when estimating environmental impact.
Considering the devastation invoked when filling up newly minted plastic vessels with rich, inland aquifers, believe this factor is not 3500 but actually much higher.
>They used something called a “life cycle assessment” which estimates the environmental impact of an item over its entire lifespan. That includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, use and disposal.
Would like to point out that extraction does get more costly over time. Think of oil wells or any other resource, the low-hanging, easy-to-grab fruits are taken first, then the tech to extract must be advanced, then more precarious pursuits in search of resource are undertaken and the ecological devastation is quite a bit more each successive time.
I just used up about 16 liters of bottled water in about 4 days because we started to doubt that our tap water got us all(family) sick at the same time. When I tried to test the water, I found no easy way to do so; all test kits on Amazon turns up with comically bad reviews. Local water testing lab only tests for specific pollutants with legal precedence like Lead, Cadmium, Mercury etc. There was not a single trustworthy test I could find to say here is a decent test profile we ran on your sample, and here is the water quality score.
Context: I moved 2 weeks ago to Amsterdam, NL from Denmark where we had been drinking tap water without any thought and trouble.
A scientifically dumb test to get off tap water while we were all sick(sore throat, bad stomach, and mild fever - yes, COVID negative) worked and we are not sick now. I don’t know whether to stop using bottled water and go back to tap water or to continue this environmentally bad choice of bottled water in fear of health.
I used to believe that tap water is a good natural choice as it packs minerals and useful natural solubles that would have been filtered out in bottled water. But, if it could get me sick, I don’t know what to do.
Hopefully we don’t get the same sickness again now that we are drinking tap water, and I could build up my trust again on tap water.
>Local water testing lab only tests for specific pollutants with legal precedence like Lead, Cadmium, Mercury etc.
Does the pollutant list only contain chemicals, or do they include microbial pollutants as well? The EPA for instance has standards for microbial pollutants in addition to chemical pollutants.
I believe the city water department tests for a more detailed set of factors(I could not get proper information because I moved here recently, and I don’t yet speak Dutch). However, the tests I could buy/order from commercial labs around here only tests for specific ones (Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, Nickel, Coliform bacteria). I’m guessing that is because those were the common culprits.
By law, the water from the tap may only contain 1 microgram pollutants per liter, and the water companies usually set themselves stricter standards (and stricter than the standards for bottled water, IIRC). Assuming you drink 2 liters per day that is 0.066 grams over the course of a 80 year life. If the cause of the illness of your family is is the tap water, then it is very likely a problem with the plumbing in or near your house.
However, even that is very unlikely. Even if the plumbing in your house is lead, that's not likely to make you ill immediately (but it will over the long term). If the pipes leak, then the water is more likely to go out than pollution getting in, due to the water pressure. Given that several members of a family get ill, the overwhelmingly more likely explanation is either a contagious disease, or food poisoning.
Since I'm Dutch and near Amsterdam (we have the same water facility over here) I can guarantee you that the Dutch tap water is of very high standard. You only buy bottled water if you are a hipster here.
I leaved for 3 years in Amsterdam coming from another European country, moved flat several times and always had bad tap water in my house. I never got sick though, but the taste was always awful. My feeling was it was not the water that was bad, but more the pipes, as most house I leaved in was old. Either way, I gave up and bought water bottle
Dumb question: isn’t it possible you got sick normally (because you moved to a different country, etc.)? And the tap water timing coincides with recovering?
It is not scientific at all. Myself, my wife and my 2 year old all got sick with the same symptoms, and we did not eat the same food in the last few days. Drinking water seemed like the common denominator.
It happens more often than you’d think. Here is one example from New Zealand, where many got sick, lots were hospitalised and some may have died. Colleagues describe the bedlam at local hospitals and the smell of the place as they were inundated with the afflicted.
Whether or not we are a first world country could be queried.
It happens very rarely in New Zealand, and when it does it is national news (or international news as per your link).
Also our government response to such events is usually functional, with national changes to procedures and systems to try and avoid repeating mistakes.
The follow on to that saga found potential unsafe water supply to 750,000 New Zealanders. Years later the situation is reported to be little better.
This bit alarmed me: “In December 2017, a government-commissioned inquiry found that 20 percent of New Zealand’s drinking water was “not demonstrably safe,” meaning at least 759,000 people could be exposed to disease-causing contaminants. It found that there were about 35,000 cases of acute gastrointestinal illness contracted via reticulated drinking water each year.”
> There was not a single trustworthy test I could find to say here is a decent test profile we ran on your sample, and here is the water quality score.
The local authorities are the ones you should be reaching out to here, not random Amazon test kits. Testing for microbial contamination is difficult and requires specialized equipment and training. There is no reliable way to DIY it, unless you have a couple of years training in a microbiology lab.
Of course the local water works in any first world country test the water every day at the water production station, but a common failure mode is that sewage and water lines run in the same ditch, and both suffer a breach.
For this reason, water works are typically very interested in receiving reports from the public and testing samples.
For Amsterdam, two minutes on Google tells me you should contact Waternet. I also found a service page where you can check whether your area is within a known fault, a and submit your complaint/info. Google Translate works well for reading this:
> The local authorities are the ones you should be reaching out to here, not random Amazon test kits. Testing for microbial contamination is difficult and requires specialized equipment and training. There is no reliable way to DIY it, unless you have a couple of years training in a microbiology lab.
Absolutely not. Remember what happened in Flint, MI? Moreover, there can be hyperlocal differences in water quality due to factors outside of a water utility's control, such as old pipes.
The best approach is to find an independent, non-government associated testing facility and send them your water for a fee. They have high-end equipment that no consumer would reasonably want to acquire and will provide unbiased results.
Note that I wrote "in any first world country". I'm sorry if your country does not qualify as such. Then the best solution is to keep paying for bottled water, or to move.
I'm not being flippant here. If, on a general basis, you can't trust the country where you live to provide you with access to clean drinking water, then you have literally failed the UN's Sustainable Development Goal no. 6: "By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all." This is something that every nation on earth aims to achieve during this decade.
To add an example, Berlin just had a “boil water and don’t shower” order out for some regions because 2 samples of their continuous water testing regime showed low amounts of some specific bacteria. The problem was rectified within a day. Tap water is taken serious here, regulations are far stricter than for bottled water.
Same in the UK - we do it so well that water safety isn't a thing anyone thinks about because tap water is simply safe.
I'm 41, I've drank "council pop" (what my grandma sweetly called it) since I was old enough to turn the tap and never once gotten ill.
Local water company does half a million tests a year - 99.949% of all tests are excellent and of the remainder vast majority are within acceptable guidelines (they go way beyond the mandated standard).
> Note that I wrote "in any first world country". I'm sorry if your country does not qualify as such.
> I'm not being flippant here.
Sorry to say, (Canadian here), yes you came off as being flippant. The issues with Flint seem to be larger than my understanding, but it was not the least contributed by issues and injustices with the demographic (majority black) and the lack of federal aid. Saying it's not a first world country isn't wise of you for these reasons and more.
> Then the best solution is to keep paying for bottled water, or to move.
Obviously not the best solution, just a bandaid over the problem in lieu of the fact that "Bottled water is 3,500 times worse for the environment than tap water".
> you can't trust the country where you live to provide you with access to clean drinking water, then you have literally failed
No. The government around the citizen failed. Saying the the victim failed is quite telling of your assumption that the individual is to blame if the government has in some capacity, in some municipal area, failed.
> literally failed the UN's Sustainable Development Goal no. 6
The goal is tied to a future date, you cannot fail it by definition in 2021. I'm sorry to say, and I'm also not being flippant here, basic math and logic is taught in "first world countries", your comment here is obviously a failure of such, and I'm sure, there's probally a UN goal I could quote as well. See what I did?
> South Africa, Russia, etc. all have grave issues.
I agree. See, we have so much in common.
> either have objective criteria, or we don't
I am not invested in any criterion discussion, merely because I'm not into political science, I am merely firing back at the original poster at their "first world" vs. "third world" views and obvously flippant tone in their message with the audacious preface of not being flippant.
The specific causal factor I understand is white flight and the associated downstream effects. That's pretty objective and measurable (tax base), but it's more of a powder keg analysis. The real cause of fault is in the pipes as the other commentor shared, something I did not fully understand until now.
The immediate cause of the issues in Flint was mismanagement. Treating the source water to moderate the PH would have prevented lead from leaching into it (the cost would have been very small). And then layered on top of that, they didn't need to switch to the source that needed that treatment. And so on.
Removing the possibility of lead leaching into drinking water is an ongoing activity in Michigan, but we are ahead of much of the country at this point (in that we are doing it).
That the US has plumbing that uses lead is of course not unique.
I'm not saying that first world countries don't have sporadic issues with water supply. They do.
What I'm arguing is that if as a general rule you can't trust the results when your local officials testing the water quality, then your country has failed at meeting the standard for a first world country.
I agree that "you have failed" would have been better framed as "your country has failed you". That was my thinking, but the sentence did not make it clear.
Yes, the UN SDG6 is a goal for 2030 - for developing nations. If you haven't already met this goal, you are a developing nation, not a first world nation.
The parent is wrong. Yes, contact government officials if you suspect the drinking water is dangerous.
I think you also are being flippant when you suggest a nation is not developed because there are isolated regions with faulty infrastructure. Flint is a tragedy, but most of the country has waterworks that pay close attention to the health of their product.
If memory serves, the contaminants in Flint were introduced after the water treatment, and could have been identified if the community had said "this is weird, come test it". That being said, if memory serves, there were also several points of corrupt/incompetent leaders who failed their leaders.
This is generally viewed as anomalous. To be clear, what happened to the residence of Flint ABSOLUTELY SUCKED. It should not have happened anywhere to anyone, and as someone who pays federal tax dollars, I'm very disappointed that my federal government let them down. I'm also suspicious that similar problems are happening in other places, but I'm not sure how to detect it.
I the US the water provider is supposed to follow EPA rules and sample water at household taps on a yearly basis for lead and copper. I wonder if Flint complied with that rule.
Even if you don’t trust tap water, reusable 5 gallon jugs are still a much cheaper and more environmentally friendly option.
As to everyone getting sick at the same time, that’s likely a function of your move. Moving long distances to a new area means being exposed to a huge range of new microbes. It’s very common to get sick in the first several months as your immune system adapts.
This was tested and they found that this made the water quality worse, because the Dutch tap water is already of high quality and the water filter makes it dirtier because bacteria start to grow on it after a while. In fact, the water company filters the water through the same type of activated carbon filter, except that the filter in the Brita is at best a couple of centimeters long whereas the filter of the water company is 2x250 centimeters long (and they use other filtration steps, not just activated carbon).
Interesting situation. Is there a particular reason a reverse osmosis filter isn’t a good possibility? I guess the better test would of been to have half the family keep on drinking tap water and see if anything changes but at the expense of the control group.
City tap water in Europe and North America is regularly tested for common parameters and yearly, more or less, for most other constituents(pollutants, minerals, chemicals etc.) It is very very unlikely you got sick from the tap water.
If you want to test your own water, find an "environmental laboratory". Communicate with them, they will help you decide which range of tests. They will also provide you with the appropriate sample bottles. (There are organic and inorganic parameters with different protocols for sampling.)
It won't be cheap however. Especially one time testing. You can spend anywhere from ($CAD) 50-150 for inorganic tests (arsenic, lead, etc.) And 150 - 500+ for organic tests ( DDT, PCB, etc etc.) Cheap and easy - but all cities do it all the time, is hardness, pH, etc.
If you are suddenly sick it is likely organic, and most likely biological (bacteria, virus.)
Also most likely from food.
But, it is fun to test your water, and interesting. (Same with the soil around you.) The world around us complex and the interweaving of systems is fascinating; as is our infrastructure to allow city living.
(Source for my diatribe: 20+years Environmental Engineer)
The city may well test tap water and find it to be safe, but this testing wouldn't account for contamination that happens downstream from their systems, e.g. caused by poor building plumbing.
I’m on the equivalent of a HOA in Berlin, and we are required by law to have periodic checks of the tap water, mostly for Legionella bacteria but afaik also general water quality.
In 2015, approximately 11000 people got sick in Dejvice, Prague 6, after wastewater contaminated the fresh water supply[1]. I was out of town, but when I returned in 2016/2017, the incident was still fresh in people's memories and their water consumption patterns clearly changed in favour of bottled water.
Our rental agreement (Germany) actually contains instructions on how to ensure that a certain kind of bacteria (legionella) doesn’t build up in the apartments plumbing.
If you are gone for > 7 days, open your taps on the hottest setting and let them run for 2 or 3 minutes. Let them run for a minute on the cold setting.
If you have a house rather than an apartment, maybe check whether there is any filtering system installed that would need a potential replacement.
A typical thing they do in less developed countries where tap water is decent but not quite reliable enough is either install an in-line filter for drinking water, or get a pitcher filter (like a Brita).
I drink bottled water because if I did not the next choice would be stuffing myself with soft drinks and other crap. I can only drink so much coffee and tea per day.
Tap water just doesn't taste well on its own.
I would be first to switch to drinking tap water if I could somehow make it taste well.
Did you try just putting it in open jugs in the fridge for a few hours? It's surprising how much chlorine, dissolved gas etc. you get rid of with this. It's my go-to when travelling to places with safe-but-off-tasting water.
I imagine people assume this because similar news reports haven't come out about bottled water, and because common advice when traveling to other countries with unsafe tap water is "use bottled water".
There are water filters for this. I don’t know what your situation is, but a BWT water filter in a carafe is perfectly capable of removing most adjuncts and making water taste like water again. I use these filters to brew coffee, and when I have a fresh filter in place, I cannot tell the difference between that water and Volvic. And my resulting brew will give any respectable cafe a run for their money. From this taste test, I can infer that my filtered water is at least as blank a palate as the Volvic. If I brewed with regular tap, I would not get clear flavors from the coffee’s oils because the tap water has plenty of solids already dissolved and can’t hold the preferred coffee.
I know of at least one high end coffee shop that uses BWT’s industrial filters - basically a canister the size of a 1L soda bottle. In reality, it would take an afternoon, some plumbing knowledge, and tools to install this at a home or office.
I think there’s a huge niche market here to better equip homes for clean water with the added benefit that they aren’t using tons of plastic (the main downside from the small carafe filters).
Of course there’s a lot more you can do to adapt your filtration of local water source. That’s because your tap water is treated and tastes funny because there are some dissolved chemicals or compounds. You can neutralize those with some basic ingredients.
My point, which in hindsight I made badly, is that saying something is 3500 times worse that something very small says very little about if that is something to be concerned about.
It could be a huge problem, and it could be completely negligible.
I think that phrasing is there to sensationalize and as clickbait.
Maybe 60 million Americans avoid tap water because they have reasons not to trust their own water, especially post-Flint. [1]
Some quick Googling turns these pages up:
- Consumer Reports founds PFAS in 117 of the 120 water samples they tested from across the US [2]
- When [chlorine] mixes with other organic compounds it can create a few harmful byproducts, including trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids [3]
- Lead poisoning is apparently also a problem in Detroit, Pittsburgh, DC [4]
- Arsenic has seeped into the water supply in California, Arizona, and New Mexico [4]
I honestly don't know if any of these are incorrect misinformation or if people are acting in a misguided fashion, but as far as I can see, there certainly doesn't seem to be a consensus on that being the case.
> Municipal source, then likely purified and minerals added back (pure water does not taste very good).
If the water claims a purification method (RO, distilled) then it is purified via that method. If it does not claim a purification method then it is almost certainly not purified.
One note that these articles and comparisons miss almost every single time - including the linked article. Bottled water is better for your health vs. the alternatives it sits next to in-store - sugar filled drinks, soda and/or diet soda - all of which are just as bad for the environment or worse.
When that health comparison is made, it becomes difficult to understand how banning or restricting bottled water makes sense when the alternative is not really tap water.
I haven't been in an office regularly for years but, at one point, a company I worked for stopped stocking bottled water and gave everyone reusable water bottles. But in part because people often wanted something to drink when they were in a meeting on another floor people wanted to grab something else from the fridge on that floor. They usually grabbed a seltzer, the usage of which pretty much shot up to equal the previous bottled water consumption.
I personally buy and drink bottled water for two reasons:
1. It tastes better as I enjoy highly mineralized water
2. It satiates thirst better.
Water I usually buy has 100ppm magnesium ions, 340ppm calcium ions and 14ppm potassium ions and it actually tastes good in comparison to tap water.
I would buy it in 20L bulk reusable bottles if it was available but it isn't.
Sadly no, that's not it. It definitely helps in lots of cases, but I've had perfectly cold tap water that doesn't really satiate like bottled water does.
FWIW, bottled water is also ~1000 times more expensive than tap water.
I find that the energy needed to produce any particular product tends to correlate pretty strongly (though not perfectly) with its price, so the headline is hardly surprising.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/spring-2019/how-d...
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/water/drinking-wate...
Some companies are even selling tapwater in bottles for a good profit, so many drink tapwater from bottles without knowing:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/23/pepsi-coke-b...
Water in plastic bottles can contain solvents and microparticles, and be worse because of that:
https://www.time.com/5581326/plastic-particles-in-bottled-wa...
The buyers are then also more likely to go the the shop by car, as heavy things are not great to buy when going by feet or bicycle.
Brita filters (or any other filters/jugs) have their own environmental costs as well but you can chug through a decent amount of tap water before you need to replace one of those. Couldn't live without one of those in Barcelona (unless I wanted to down a glass full of limestone), and was much more useful than lugging back a few huge jugs of bottled water every few days.
Back in the UK, not a single reason to buy water in a bottle unless you're outside and in a pinch.
What kind of water filter would that be? A simple small filter you attach to the faucet or a proper arm-sized cylinder you place somewhere along your water pipes? I am not sure how well those filters remove all contaminants like heavy metals and such.
In most of eastern you need partuculate, charcoal and ion-exchange in series to somewhat approach acceptable levels of shit in it.
Berkey water filters are a good basic option.
Good to know about Berkey, there are lots of options out there.
I'm an European, and that tinge of superiority is quite grating.
I'm a German who has been to many German places and I've never encountered tap water that was disgusting to drink...
I can't speak about countries outside of Europe because I don't know their regulations. That's why I said Europe.
Edit: After a bit more research I see that Western European tap water is mostly safe.
Flavour is something else of course. If a filter helps than that is great. Healthier than mixing it with lemonade or coffee.
You need to give people a reason to care by appealing to their self-interest. The only way I can see this regarding this problem is a tax on single-use plastics to make them very expensive.
[1]: https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/environmental-safety/revers...
I've been to very few places (in the US) that the water tasted good from the tap. One was a major metro, the others were places with well water.
My parents live in a medium sized Texas city that has tap water that is typically brown, sometimes it comes out of the tap foamy. Some filter it, but many just buy bottled.
I use a simple filter at home to improve taste. However, after living in hurricane and tornado prone areas, I keep a small supply of water on hand (a few cases of bottled) for emergencies.
Source/pictures? I find it hard to believe such water would be allowed by the EPA. This is also strange, considering that I've been to countries without drinkable tap water (eg. you have to boil it), and the water doesn't look like that.
One google search away https://www.businessinsider.com/cities-worst-tap-water-us-20...
I think it has to do with minerals in the supply being stirred up by rain water and reacting with treatment chemicals.
EPA doesn't care to much about the taste, color, or appearance of the water as long as it is "safe" to drink.
It's not that simple. The quality isn't the cause, the cause is people's lack of trust in their water. It's not like you can just judge water quality by its color and taste.
e.g., "Drinking water from 118 of 120 (!!!) locations tested across the US had levels of PFAS or arsenic above Consumer Report's recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead." [1]
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/water-quality/how-safe-is-ou...
That is part of what determines water quality.
Reverse osmosis and similar systems are affordable especially compared to the cost of bottled water.
What about the pipe fitters union lobbying to require lead pipes decades after universal acceptance of the dangers of lead and the enormous cost to replace?
They even tried to push this on existing apartments, but I'd have to consume 33% less than average just to break-even. Hard to do when HVAC&DHW are central and laundry is common.
So while I would have some incentive to conserve, I end up poorer and somebody else gets rich off account fees and likely lives a very wasteful life.
Then the transition to smart meters that do time-of-day billing, but its been shown to shift demand by under 1 percent. Meanwhile the thing consumes a few watts 24/7 + implementation capex. Meter-reading is now remote, but what did the meter-reader human start doing instead?
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...
presumably unemployed. Not that's a bad thing, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I explained that I saw a documentary ~10 years ago where the claim was if you can do one thing for the environment, please stop purchasing bottled water. It seemed like an easy request, so why not.
I then rhetorically asked him if he "felt good" about himself because he doesn't just throw his trash out the car window, which is what we city kids (and adults) used to do in the early 80s. "No you don't do it and you don't think about it, right ? It's the same with my water bottle. I don't lecture anyone, and I honestly didn't think once about what he or others are doing."
Culture changes many times for the better. It's odd though how some people are the last to get the memo despite similar demographics.
Someone once told me you can learn everything about a person by what they do with their empty cart at the grocery store.
To be honest, it does look ridiculous hauling all your shit around like some hiker. It lacks grace and is out of proportion with the task at hand. This must be an American thing. I do not recall students elsewhere roaming school halls around like hobos with all their belongings.
(Not an American here, trying to recall something that might be wrong)
IIRC American schools have classrooms assigned to subjects. I.e. there is an English classroom and a Physics classroom and a French classroom.
So you would typically have the entire student population move between classrooms after every lesson.
This is not how my (German) school worked. Apart from a few exceptions (like the Music and Chemistry classroom), classrooms were assigned to grades. We would have Maths and English and History all in the same classroom, and only switch classrooms once or twice daily.
It's not what you do, it's where you rank in the social dominance hierarchy.
How did he respond to the "you don't and you don't think about it" bit?
It's very natural though to ask about something that is different in some way.
Is he?
Not so much "afraid" (I don't think they will attack me) as "deeply disgusted", particularly by their smell, and their fouling of my foods. There are lots of reasons to hate cockroaches.
Expertise in one field doesn't imply expertise in others even if they appear closely related to the layperson.
To me it means the PhDs have a high degree of confidence in their own beliefs (surely thinking they've come to their conclusions rationally and with rigorous scientific reasoning), and no push will change their minds. Whether this self-evaluation is accurate or not, is a different question. I wonder what their PhDs are even in, if it's molecular biology, then, well, maybe there's a case there, but a PhD in, say, Polynesian cultures?
Although as PhDs they should know more about confirmation bias...
Is there more context to this conversation? The reason of course could've been that, but it also seems like there's a chance (not high, I admit) he might've seen the local tap water as dangerous and tried to think of a compelling reason why you would still drink it despite that. Especially if the topic has previously come up.
No extra resources wasted to produce a fancy water bottle, and you don't need to worry too much if you lose it.
I do wonder if, by reusing the bottles, there could be harmful chemicals leeching out.
The article wholey ignores the costs of production for non-disposable water bottles. They absolutely take more resources to produce and you thus need to refill any given water bottle a certain number of times before you break even with disposable bottled water. For absent minded folks like me, constantly buying replacement bottles can be a worse impact on the environment.
Society doesn't and IMO shouldn't optimize for the absent-minded. Do you also loose your keys, wallet and phone on a regular basis? Maybe it's not a memory thing but more of a value thing.
It is definitely a memory / attention thing. I don't see how I made any suggestion that "society needs to optimize" for me.
My point is that you need to asses the full lifecycle costs of any alternative given individual differences.
This is just how I'm reading the conversation.
As others have said, maybe if you spent $15 on a purpose-built, non-BPA, reliable water bottle, you would use it less because your mind wouldn't perceive it to be disposable.
You have the causality exactly backwards. It is the frequency with which I have lost expensive water bottles that caused me to stop using them in most situations.
I don't understand why people only replied to try and tell me how my brain works rather that to engage with the core idea of comment.
This must be an American thing. I do not recall this being the case elsewhere that I visited.
The trash problem seems to have worsened - especially in the cities. Municipal governments have eliminated street cleaning from their service portfolio and now seem to mostly rely on things getting so bad that some civil group sign on to their adopt-a-highway program and make some effort to clean things up once or twice a year. Hard to take care of the home when you're busy sending trillions to destroying people's lives in other parts of the world.
The difficulty I have in looking optimistically toward the future comes from my lack of confidence in the leadership of this nation. An entrenched two-party system and a complicit media has led us to a place where we cannot adequately provide for basic human needs (education, health, and housing). Without caring for those things for all of the people living within our borders, the hard choices we will need to make are going to bring us through a period of turmoil as the pains of adjustment are felt unevenly throughout our society. Someone is going to lose and it probably won't be the rich and upper middle class. We will likely end up covering them for the loss of their beach-side property while the poor sod living in the countryside will be treated like we currently treat our homeless.
It wasn't, and isn't today, an American thing. Plenty of countries had, and even still do have, casual attitudes about littering.
I've got bad news for you - look up into antacids and how they block acid barrier. Every other one uses them.
I am not into cleaning frenzy, quite the opposite, but water should be kept as sterile as possible IMO.
Ecolab oasis multiquat is what I buy, it’s like $80-100 but the dilution ratio means you are unlikely to run out.
Every so often I think about this. I use a 32 ounce insulated stainless steel bottle, no disposable bottles. However, every time I have to wash it I take note of the fact that it take several fill-swish-dump cycles to clean it. If I use soap it take even more to get it all out.
In other words, someone could make an argument that I am wasting water. I haven't quantified it yet, so I don't have a really good metric from which to judge this. I probably rinse the bottle every couple of days.
>it takes three times as much water to produce a plastic bottle as it can hold.
I also use an insulated stainless steel bottle will only wash if I notice a scent. It's been over 6 M since the last time I washed.
Plastic, especially new plastic, actually leaches compounds into water. As plastic gets old, its leaching capacity goes down. Old plastic is safer than newer plastic. However, most plastic bottles, including BPA-free are estrogenic. They are bad for men and women causing a variety of problems which are still poorly understood.
The worse use-case is plastic filled bottles, like water, that have sat or have been transported in hot environments which is to say all of them. Ditto for hot takeout food served in plastic containers - soups, curries, etc.
People who buy bottled water are literally paying money to get poisoned for a teeny bit of convenience. I know most water fountains are not cleaned properly but that water is safer (by orders of magnitudes, but I have no data to cite) than bottled water.
A lot of this is problematic for the evidence driven folks. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but please use the precautionary principle.
They could have headlines reading "bottled water is over 3000 million billion trillion googol times worse for the environment than tap water".
They could then follow up with the same statement about cars, straws, recyclable straws, spinach, or anything with any non-zero effect at all.
"How many times worse" is a nonsense comparison meant for sensationalism.
Hence I buy bottled water.
ADDED: I don't mean this facetiously. Even if I drank bottled water rather than tap water (which I don't in general), I definitely would want to know if I suspected my tap water wasn't potable for some reason.
I'm a bit surprised there wouldn't be equivalent resources in Western Europe.
(ppm of what?)
https://slate.com/business/2013/07/cost-of-bottled-water-vs-...
>They used something called a “life cycle assessment” which estimates the environmental impact of an item over its entire lifespan. That includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, use and disposal.
Would like to point out that extraction does get more costly over time. Think of oil wells or any other resource, the low-hanging, easy-to-grab fruits are taken first, then the tech to extract must be advanced, then more precarious pursuits in search of resource are undertaken and the ecological devastation is quite a bit more each successive time.
I just used up about 16 liters of bottled water in about 4 days because we started to doubt that our tap water got us all(family) sick at the same time. When I tried to test the water, I found no easy way to do so; all test kits on Amazon turns up with comically bad reviews. Local water testing lab only tests for specific pollutants with legal precedence like Lead, Cadmium, Mercury etc. There was not a single trustworthy test I could find to say here is a decent test profile we ran on your sample, and here is the water quality score.
Context: I moved 2 weeks ago to Amsterdam, NL from Denmark where we had been drinking tap water without any thought and trouble.
A scientifically dumb test to get off tap water while we were all sick(sore throat, bad stomach, and mild fever - yes, COVID negative) worked and we are not sick now. I don’t know whether to stop using bottled water and go back to tap water or to continue this environmentally bad choice of bottled water in fear of health.
I used to believe that tap water is a good natural choice as it packs minerals and useful natural solubles that would have been filtered out in bottled water. But, if it could get me sick, I don’t know what to do.
Hopefully we don’t get the same sickness again now that we are drinking tap water, and I could build up my trust again on tap water.
Does the pollutant list only contain chemicals, or do they include microbial pollutants as well? The EPA for instance has standards for microbial pollutants in addition to chemical pollutants.
However, even that is very unlikely. Even if the plumbing in your house is lead, that's not likely to make you ill immediately (but it will over the long term). If the pipes leak, then the water is more likely to go out than pollution getting in, due to the water pressure. Given that several members of a family get ill, the overwhelmingly more likely explanation is either a contagious disease, or food poisoning.
Whether or not we are a first world country could be queried.
https://watersource.awa.asn.au/community/public-health/lesso...
Also our government response to such events is usually functional, with national changes to procedures and systems to try and avoid repeating mistakes.
This bit alarmed me: “In December 2017, a government-commissioned inquiry found that 20 percent of New Zealand’s drinking water was “not demonstrably safe,” meaning at least 759,000 people could be exposed to disease-causing contaminants. It found that there were about 35,000 cases of acute gastrointestinal illness contracted via reticulated drinking water each year.”
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/99591173/state-of-ne...
https://m.scoop.co.nz/stories/GE2102/S00058/new-zealand-town...
And sometimes things really go wrong and people die. In 2000 in Ontario 6 people died and dozens were hospitalized.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak
The local authorities are the ones you should be reaching out to here, not random Amazon test kits. Testing for microbial contamination is difficult and requires specialized equipment and training. There is no reliable way to DIY it, unless you have a couple of years training in a microbiology lab.
Of course the local water works in any first world country test the water every day at the water production station, but a common failure mode is that sewage and water lines run in the same ditch, and both suffer a breach.
For this reason, water works are typically very interested in receiving reports from the public and testing samples.
For Amsterdam, two minutes on Google tells me you should contact Waternet. I also found a service page where you can check whether your area is within a known fault, a and submit your complaint/info. Google Translate works well for reading this:
https://www.waternet.nl/service-en-contact/problemen-met-wat...
Absolutely not. Remember what happened in Flint, MI? Moreover, there can be hyperlocal differences in water quality due to factors outside of a water utility's control, such as old pipes.
The best approach is to find an independent, non-government associated testing facility and send them your water for a fee. They have high-end equipment that no consumer would reasonably want to acquire and will provide unbiased results.
I'm not being flippant here. If, on a general basis, you can't trust the country where you live to provide you with access to clean drinking water, then you have literally failed the UN's Sustainable Development Goal no. 6: "By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all." This is something that every nation on earth aims to achieve during this decade.
I'm 41, I've drank "council pop" (what my grandma sweetly called it) since I was old enough to turn the tap and never once gotten ill.
Local water company does half a million tests a year - 99.949% of all tests are excellent and of the remainder vast majority are within acceptable guidelines (they go way beyond the mandated standard).
> I'm not being flippant here.
Sorry to say, (Canadian here), yes you came off as being flippant. The issues with Flint seem to be larger than my understanding, but it was not the least contributed by issues and injustices with the demographic (majority black) and the lack of federal aid. Saying it's not a first world country isn't wise of you for these reasons and more.
> Then the best solution is to keep paying for bottled water, or to move.
Obviously not the best solution, just a bandaid over the problem in lieu of the fact that "Bottled water is 3,500 times worse for the environment than tap water".
> you can't trust the country where you live to provide you with access to clean drinking water, then you have literally failed
No. The government around the citizen failed. Saying the the victim failed is quite telling of your assumption that the individual is to blame if the government has in some capacity, in some municipal area, failed.
> literally failed the UN's Sustainable Development Goal no. 6
The goal is tied to a future date, you cannot fail it by definition in 2021. I'm sorry to say, and I'm also not being flippant here, basic math and logic is taught in "first world countries", your comment here is obviously a failure of such, and I'm sure, there's probally a UN goal I could quote as well. See what I did?
How is thus an excuse? South Africa, Russia, etc. all have grave issues. either have objective criteria, or we don't
Because it is a causal factor and not an excuse?
> South Africa, Russia, etc. all have grave issues.
I agree. See, we have so much in common.
> either have objective criteria, or we don't
I am not invested in any criterion discussion, merely because I'm not into political science, I am merely firing back at the original poster at their "first world" vs. "third world" views and obvously flippant tone in their message with the audacious preface of not being flippant.
The specific causal factor I understand is white flight and the associated downstream effects. That's pretty objective and measurable (tax base), but it's more of a powder keg analysis. The real cause of fault is in the pipes as the other commentor shared, something I did not fully understand until now.
Removing the possibility of lead leaching into drinking water is an ongoing activity in Michigan, but we are ahead of much of the country at this point (in that we are doing it).
That the US has plumbing that uses lead is of course not unique.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/worried-about-lead-in-your-wat...
What I'm arguing is that if as a general rule you can't trust the results when your local officials testing the water quality, then your country has failed at meeting the standard for a first world country.
I agree that "you have failed" would have been better framed as "your country has failed you". That was my thinking, but the sentence did not make it clear.
Yes, the UN SDG6 is a goal for 2030 - for developing nations. If you haven't already met this goal, you are a developing nation, not a first world nation.
I think you also are being flippant when you suggest a nation is not developed because there are isolated regions with faulty infrastructure. Flint is a tragedy, but most of the country has waterworks that pay close attention to the health of their product.
If memory serves, the contaminants in Flint were introduced after the water treatment, and could have been identified if the community had said "this is weird, come test it". That being said, if memory serves, there were also several points of corrupt/incompetent leaders who failed their leaders.
This is generally viewed as anomalous. To be clear, what happened to the residence of Flint ABSOLUTELY SUCKED. It should not have happened anywhere to anyone, and as someone who pays federal tax dollars, I'm very disappointed that my federal government let them down. I'm also suspicious that similar problems are happening in other places, but I'm not sure how to detect it.
As to everyone getting sick at the same time, that’s likely a function of your move. Moving long distances to a new area means being exposed to a huge range of new microbes. It’s very common to get sick in the first several months as your immune system adapts.
https://www.thespruce.com/best-reverse-osmosis-systems-45868...
California cities do it every year, and the results are public: just look up "water quality report" or "consumer confidence report" + your city.
[1]: https://vodnihospodarstvi.cz/dejvicka-havarie-a-epidemie-neb...
If you are gone for > 7 days, open your taps on the hottest setting and let them run for 2 or 3 minutes. Let them run for a minute on the cold setting.
If you have a house rather than an apartment, maybe check whether there is any filtering system installed that would need a potential replacement.
Tap water just doesn't taste well on its own.
I would be first to switch to drinking tap water if I could somehow make it taste well.
How do you actually tell if the water is safe? There have been so many news reports about unsafe tap water across the US.
I know of at least one high end coffee shop that uses BWT’s industrial filters - basically a canister the size of a 1L soda bottle. In reality, it would take an afternoon, some plumbing knowledge, and tools to install this at a home or office.
I think there’s a huge niche market here to better equip homes for clean water with the added benefit that they aren’t using tons of plastic (the main downside from the small carafe filters).
Of course there’s a lot more you can do to adapt your filtration of local water source. That’s because your tap water is treated and tastes funny because there are some dissolved chemicals or compounds. You can neutralize those with some basic ingredients.
https://www.baristahustle.com/blog/barista-hustle-water-reci...
If this isn't the pinnacle of western privilege then I don't know anymore
We have extremely good tap water where I live, water actually gets bottled and exported from here. But it is soft water, so it is quite bland.
How bad is tap water for the environment? AFAIK, not bad at all.
And 3,500 times 0 is 0.
It could be a huge problem, and it could be completely negligible.
I think that phrasing is there to sensationalize and as clickbait.
Some quick Googling turns these pages up:
- Consumer Reports founds PFAS in 117 of the 120 water samples they tested from across the US [2]
- When [chlorine] mixes with other organic compounds it can create a few harmful byproducts, including trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids [3]
- Lead poisoning is apparently also a problem in Detroit, Pittsburgh, DC [4]
- Arsenic has seeped into the water supply in California, Arizona, and New Mexico [4]
I honestly don't know if any of these are incorrect misinformation or if people are acting in a misguided fashion, but as far as I can see, there certainly doesn't seem to be a consensus on that being the case.
[1] https://theconversation.com/nearly-60-million-americans-dont...
[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/water-quality/how-safe-is-ou...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/signs-tap-water-contaminated...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/toxic-chemicals-tap-drinking...
If the water claims a purification method (RO, distilled) then it is purified via that method. If it does not claim a purification method then it is almost certainly not purified.
When that health comparison is made, it becomes difficult to understand how banning or restricting bottled water makes sense when the alternative is not really tap water.
Water I usually buy has 100ppm magnesium ions, 340ppm calcium ions and 14ppm potassium ions and it actually tastes good in comparison to tap water. I would buy it in 20L bulk reusable bottles if it was available but it isn't.
I definitely have seen this effect. Do you know why this is? Is there a scientific reason why?
You can save a huge amount of money (and plastic bottles) by having a Brita jug in the fridge.
Clearly your winters don't get particularly cold?
Being totally honest, it's practically insulting that you think the comprehension of cold water is somehow beyond the people you're talking to.
I find that the energy needed to produce any particular product tends to correlate pretty strongly (though not perfectly) with its price, so the headline is hardly surprising.
[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Purified-Drinking-Wat...
[2]: https://www.move.org/utility-bills-101/
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%243.98+%2F+%2840*1...