A reminder of why we should still drink tap water

Bringing it all together

This post will be bringing together new information with some snippets from past entries to reinforce why we choose to drink tap water. Some reports in the media have come out in the past couple weeks that may urge us back to the bottle. We stay strong and healthy by choosing tap, and here’s why.

Controversy about tap water

On September 13, just last week, the New York Times published “Clean Water Laws Neglected, at a Cost,” exposing the United States’ noncompliance with the Clean Water Act. This act, enacted in 1972, establishes regulations for states and companies to follow when affecting, through pollution, the chemical, physical, and biological

makeup of bodies of water surrounding them. The Times article reveals that regulators have ignored companies’ extreme violations of the Clean Water Act, therefore increasing the amount of dangerous pollutants in communities’ drinking water. Renegade journalist Charles Duhigg outlines how individuals’ exposure to illegal concentrations of many of these materials, including lead, nickel, copper, zinc, chlorine, and selenium, may contribute to higher occurrences of cancer, mental retardation, skin rashes, tooth decay, and stomach ulcers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?_r=1&hp

http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/lcwa.html

EPA’s action for clean water

Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the EPA and subject whom I often admire in this forum, has already addressed the issue of water safety. Since President Obama appointed Jackson to her position within the EPA, the regulating body for the Clean Water Act, Jackson has requested supplemental appropriations to the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. For the fund, Jackson has requested $2.4 billion from Congress’s appropriations for the 2010 fiscal year; this is $1.7 billion more than what the fund received in 2009. With these appropriations, Jackson claims the EPA will be enabled to direct cost-effective and environmentally positive efforts to repair and better manage clean water facilities in U.S. communities.

http://www.epa.gov/ocir/hearings/testimony/111_2009_2010/2009_0616_lpj.pdf

Studies have often, often found that tap water is no worse than bottled water

In 2005, ABC’s 20/20 recruited microbiologists to compare the materials, including bacteria, within tap water to those materials within bottled water. Finding no difference between New York City tap water and bottled water, these scientists recommended that individuals consume tap water, which can cost up to 500 times less money than bottled water.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/Story?id=728070&page=1

Drinking tap water saves our environment, after all

As I’ve more recently posted, between 2005 and 2008, Americans increased their plastic water bottle consumption by 59 percent and pumped $5.9 billion into the bottled water industry. Of American consumers, up to 70 percent claim to drink bottled water. Beverage Marketing Corp. reports that these consumers drank 8.7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2008 and 8.8 billion in 2007. These figures respectively amount to 29 and 28.5 gallons per capita. Huge.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203074.html

This rate of bottled water consumption is harmful to the globe and our dwindling natural resources. Food & Water Watch also reports that bottled water manufacturers and distributors use over 17 million barrels of oil to produce the bottled water that Americans consume in one year. This amount of oil, which would be enough to fuel one million cars per year, is further wasted by consumers’ refusal to recycle these plastic bottles. Food & Water Watch claim that consumers throw about 86 percent of these bottles into the trash and, subsequently, into landfills.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203074.html

Pat Franklin, of the Container Recycling Institute, reports that Americans dispose over 60 million plastic bottles into U.S. landfills and incinerators each year. With over 3 thousand functioning landfills and over 10,000 municipal, stagnant landfills existing in the United States, Franklin expresses concern about these landfills’ pollutant-emissions and toxin-leaching into the earth and groundwater.  Landfill liners, he explains, only have the thickness of 1/10 in., which allows for the eventual leaching of the toxin leachate into the ground. Landfill liners, unsustainable after decades of chemical components decaying them and leaching into our earth and air, present a threat to public health and safety.

Health risks of plastics, the real tap alternative

Bottled water consumers’ health risks also occur during the act of drinking water. Franklin mentions that the United States EPA sets more water quality standards for tap water than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) poses for bottled water. Since Franklin’s report, researchers have pinpointed and examined the toxin Bisphenol A (BPA), which appears in most plastic water bottles, leaches into water, and can cause severe health problems for consumers.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/what-plastics-do-to-your-body.html

 http://www.container-recycling.org/media/newsarticles/plastic/2006/5-WMW-DownDrain.ht

BPA polycarbonate is used to make common plastic items, including Nalgene™ bottles, dishes, liners of metal cans, baby bottles, and bottled water plastic. The compound BPA is a lab-derived form of estrogen, used commonly to affect the hardness and durability of products it appears in BPA easily leaches into contained water, especially if the plastic container has been refilled, heated, or frozen. Researchers, like Claude Hughes and Frederick S. vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia, have found that by providing unnatural amounts of estrogen to those drinking contaminated water, BPA can be linked to irregular puberty, obesity, infertility, and cancer in both males and females. In lab experiments, these researchers have found that BPA can cause animals’ early puberty and production of pre-cancerous cells. By constantly drinking from bottled water, consumers ingest harmful amounts of the BPA toxin.

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7713/7713.html

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/what-plastics-do-to-your-body.html

Plastics fester bacteria, remember?

I have already written a full entry about this. Consumers also risk ingesting greater amounts of bacteria by drinking from plastic bottles, especially if these individuals refill and reuse their bottles. An Oregon laboratory tested used plastic water bottles for bacteria colony counts and discovered large rates of bacteria growth, even in bottles that had been scrubbed with soap. A bottle they washed the day before the test grew an average of 2,400 colonies, and one bottle they tested grew over 4,100 bacteria colonies on its surface. The researchers repeatedly found that the plastic surface allowed faster growth of bacteria than other surfaces, such as glass.

http://blog.sierratradingpost.com/in-outdoors-camping-gear-forest-trails/reused-plastic-water-bottles-loaded-with-bacteria/

And by national and state EPA standards, tap water contains fluorine to kill bacteria, and throughout the past decade researchers have periodically found greater amounts of fluorine in tap water than in bottled water. By drinking fluorine-filled tap water from a glass, consumers avoid the risk of ingesting the bacteria that can easily fester inside opened plastic water bottles.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000322090356.htm

Tap water wastes money

American consumers are now reportedly spending less money to buy bottled water, which can be attributed, yes, to the nationwide recession. Nestle, the leading corporation for bottled water sales, has experienced a drop in sales this year for the first time in six years. In the beginning of 2009, profits dropped 2.9 percent across all Nestle bottled water brands: Poland Spring, Deer Park, S. Pellegrino and Perrier. These consumers presumably choose to drink tap water instead. Good call.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203074.html

Reporter Maura Judkis credits anti-plastic bottle campaigns for this turn in consumption. She sites the campaigns

“Take Back the Tap” and “TapIt” that motivate Americans to avoid bottled water and to be more ecologically conscious. These campaigns encourage consumers to invest in BPA-free metal water bottles and water filters for tap water. H₂Ox2, the online company I’ve often sited, provides a forum for bloggers to share research about plastics while selling alternative water container and filtering products. The site sells individual bottle filters for $8.70 and even larger water-capacity filters for $118. American consumers are creating a demand for tap water products, which they are willing to invest in to save money, save their health, or save the environment.

www.h2ox2.com/store/

People are getting informed and bringing it all back to common sense. Buy a filter for your tap water if you’re afraid that your tap water hasn’t be adequately purified. I believe these horrible stories about communities with inadequate regulators. This is why we need to lobby Congress to be pumping money into the EPA for programs like the Clean Water funds and Superfund. And we already see the EPA taking action on existing cases of unpurified tap water sources. The consequences of consuming non-tap water are overwhelming and worth the investment of buying a filter or addressing policy makers for more strict tap water regulations. Drink tap. Tap it. Tap that. Whatever. Tap water is key here.