Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [48]
It is possible to get arsenic out of water. Pour-through filters (such as a Brita or a PUR) don’t do the job, but reverse-osmosis filters certified by NSF (a nonprofit group that develops public-health and safety standards and tests) claim to remove the metal but don’t guarantee it. Another option is on the horizon, but it probably won’t scale up for city systems: Pteris vittata, or ladder brake fern, has been found to soak up arsenic through its roots, which grow in either soil or water, and store the metal in its fronds. But what to do with the toxic fronds?
Either seal them in airtight containers, says Edenspace, a Virginia-based company that licenses the patent for the ferns and sells them commercially, or dispose of them in a hazardous-waste facility. One can only hope that this facility never leaches into groundwater, and thence into wells.
Not everyone is happy with the feds’ arsenic limits, but at least arsenic has a standard. So political is the debate over the health effects of perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel, that the EPA hasn’t set allowable levels for the chemical in drinking water. But it’s there.
Perchlorate contaminates the water sources of between eleven and twenty million people across the country, mainly in areas where the Department of Defense manufactured weapons and rocket fuel. Before production stopped in 1998, the Kerr-McGee plant in Henderson, Nevada, manufactured thirty thousand tons of the chemical each month. After perchlorate was discovered in the Colorado River, the company initiated a one-hundredmillion-dollar cleanup program. As of April 2005, pumps and filters had removed more than three million pounds of perchlorate from groundwater, but the chemical still enters the river daily, tainting the drinking water of people in Nevada, Arizona, and California. “It is really one of the most massive pollution problems the water industry has ever seen,” Timothy Brick, of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told High Country News during the cleanup.
By interfering with the ability of the thyroid gland to produce hormones that control growth and metabolism, perchlorate disrupts normal brain development in fetuses and infants. (Not surprisingly, it’s also used to treat hyperthyroidism.) Some studies say the chemical can cause thyroid tumors in adults, but it’s pregnant women and infants—the usual suspects—who are most strongly warned to steer clear of perchlorate-laced water. Advocacy groups as well as scientific experts at the EPA, and Congresswoman Hilda L. Solis from California, have pressured the Bush administration to set a federal drinking-water standard for perchlorate that is protective of prebirth and newborn infants. So far, no luck. The process seems hopelessly mired in politics. On one hand you’ve got sufficient evidence that rocket fuel in drinking water is a health hazard; and on the other hand, you’ve got enormously powerful aerospace and defense industries not thrilled to spend billions on cleanups. (As with arsenic, reverse osmosis removes perchlorate from tap water, but carbon filtering doesn’t.)
Farther east, underground plumes of perfluorochemicals (PFC), a compound linked with organ damage, contaminate private and municipal wells in twenty-five communities around Minneapolis. Unregulated by the federal government, PFCs have also been found in New Jersey, West Virginia, and North Carolina.
In twenty-four states, the U.S. Geological Survey has found methyl tertiary butyl ether, aka MTBE, in groundwater. A gasoline additive that reduces carbon monoxide and ozone levels caused