Can you see which glass of water fills with you with contaminants as it quenches your thirst? Can you see which glass of water is nothing but pure H2O? The truth of it is this: if you don’t know exactly how your water has been treated from source to sip (whether bottled or from a well or tap) then the safety of that water is completely out of your hands.
Harms of Tap Water – Raw and Treated
Water that reaches municipal homes is acquired, treated, dispensed, and recycled from waste, retention, and sewage water by local water treatment facilities.
The only enforcing body for this water treatment is the federal law of the Environmental Protection Agency, and is mainly driven through the guidelines of the Safe Drinking Water Act[3]. While poised to strengthen public health protection from contaminants in drinking water, the EPA only regulates 91 contaminants – despite the observations that there are over 60,000 chemicals ingested in the United States (and thus excreted into the water supply). This 60,000 estimate, by the way, comes from (you guessed it) the Environmental Protection Agency [1]. Your water quality level may not be violating the law, but there’s no way it’s been cleaned to a level ensuring a minimal amount of chemicals or disease causing pollutants interact with you and your immune system.
If you’re surprised at the notion of “bare minimums” in a government regulated facility that concerns the safety of the public, here is the head of a Florida Utility Authority letting his words stand for themselves:
“ ‘If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it,’ said Stephen Sorrell, executive director of Emerald Coast Utilities Authority, which serves Pensacola, Fla. Data show that his system has delivered water containing multiple chemicals at concentrations that research indicates are associated with health risks. The system has not violated the Safe Drinking Water Act during the last half-decade.The Times examined concentrations of 335 chemicals that government agencies have determined were associated with serious health risks. The analysis counted only instances in which the same chemical was detected at least 10 times for a single water system since 2004, at a concentration that the government has said poses at least a 1-in-10,000 risk of causing disease.
That is roughly equivalent to the cancer risk posed by undergoing 100 X-rays. “
– New York Times
Tap water drinkers might need to pause and accept this reality; take a brief moment. When anybody hears it for the first time it’s a shock – water is the fluid of life! The same percentage of water in the world is the same percentage that our bodies consist of – it is innate in nature![2] Everyone needs water each and every day, but it’s a hard fact that the publicly available water is in no way as clean as can be.
And if the level of removal isn’t to your liking, you won’t believe the dangers of what they’ll add to the water. Long story short, adding fluoride to water for fighting tooth decay doesn’t necessarily outweigh the research documented effects of lowered fertility, lowered IQ, and pineal gland calcification in subjected populations [2]. Like most points of scientific inquiry, do your in-depth research and you’ll find there’s a lot to swallow.
Harms of Bottled Water – The Whole Story
Now I’m sure anybody who was #TeamTapWater may be thinking of jumping ship right now. Slow your roll, however, if your next turn is toward a cold, hard, shiny bottle of pre-packaged water. You might not be in the clear just yet.
It is a little known fact that the norm since 2009 was nearly half (48.7%) of bottled water facilities using municipal tap water supplies[4] all the same. So right there the idea of a “safer source” can be thrown out the window as often as “heads” on a coin toss. And as far as the path it takes along the way… there’s not much to say on that. Running as private corporations they are inherently regulated even less than public tap water (and we just saw how thorough that can be) and in fact only 3 could be found to publish purity information at the same level as public facilities[4].
When it comes to the point of quenching your thirst, know that you may still be subject to foreign chemicals. Both Nicotine in significant quantity and 58 active pharmaceuticals were detected in 5 of 10 randomly sampled of bottled mineral water brands[1]. Independent testing of bottled water conducted by the Environmental Working Group in 2008 also found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand[4].
Bottled water may offer the impression of a pristinely sourced, purified, and single-serving dose of clean water, but is all that worth:
- The energy equivalent of 32 and 54 million barrels of oil to produce and transport plastic water bottles used in just a year’s time
- A pollution rate of 75 percent, leaving empty plastic bottles in our landfills, lakes, streams and oceans
- Small towns around the world exploited for water resources to feed the manufactured demand of giant corporations re-selling public water
- The estimated that two liters of water needed to bottle every liter on the store shelf, resulting in approximately 72 billion gallons wasted annually worldwide
There are COSTS to leaving the responsibility of your drinking water quality up to a private corporation, a secluded and distant authority, who couldn’t possibly have the health and wellness of YOUR family at the forefront of their mind.
Take back Control to gain Awareness of what’s in your drinking water
If you don’t know for sure, then the only thing you can be sure of is that you have no influence on the ones who actually know the whole story of what’s in every sip you take; the composition of each drop that flows through your home. Your eyesight won’t tell you, you have to get deeper than that for yourself. And like every unseen element of nature, we never understand it until we test, ask questions, and find out just what it’s made of.
References
- Environmental Protection Agency
- GreenMedInfo
- The New York Times
- Food & Water Watch
