What If Your Tap Water Is Not Safe to Drink?

By Elizabeth Royte, Huffington Post. Posted August 19, 2008.

It's easy to be disdainful of bottled water if you've got no problem with tap. I live in a city with excellent municipal water. I've got lead-free pipes, a nice reusable bottle (which I almost always remember to bring with me), and I have no qualms about refilling it from public spigots or sinks. But not everyone is so lucky, and despite the airtight arguments against bottled water- it costs thousands of times more than tap, it often tastes no different, and it has a significant carbon footprint -- it isn't so easy for everyone to quit the habit.

And that's the dirty little secret behind the bottled-water wars. Not all tap water is perfect. It may meet all federal and state requirements but smell like rotten eggs or a swimming pool. The Environmental Protection Agency calls many taste and odor problems an "aesthetic," not health, issue, in which case a decent filter may solve the problem. But what if your water contains high levels of carcinogenic disinfection byproducts, which can result when organic matter mixes with chlorine? What if you live near an industrial plant or an army base that's contaminated your groundwater? It's happened around Binghamton, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, and dozens of cities around the nation. A countertop filter isn't going to protect you from perchlorate, perfluorochemicals, or trichloroethene.

The fact is, 89.3 percent of the nation's community water systems met or exceeded federal standards in 2007 (down from 92 percent in 2006). It sounds good, but that still leaves more than 29 million people drinking water that missed the mark on either health or reporting standards. (Utilities that fail to report test results to the feds may be trying to hide something considered unhealthy.) Who are the unlucky millions? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, they live in small communities that lack the funding to take good care of their water. Utility managers deal the hand they're dealt, in terms of source water, but the ones with more financial resources inevitably play a better hand.

For those with sub-par tap water, does a retreat to the bottle make sense? Hardly. First, bottled water isn't necessarily more healthful than tap. The Food and Drug Administration allows in bottled water basically the same levels of contaminants the EPA allows in tap water (no naturally occurring water is absolutely pure). Contaminants that go unregulated by the EPA -- such as perchlorate or MTBE, a gasoline additive - also go unregulated by the FDA. While utility customers can learn the results of testing from annual reports, bottlers aren't required to reveal the results of either their self-testing or their far less frequent independent inspections. As an EPA employee told me, with bottled water "it's a crapshoot what you're getting." Another difference: bottled water is tested at the plant, not after it's been sitting in plastic for up to two years. Chemicals from bottles have been shown to leach into water over time.

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Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It and Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.

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