Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [49]
In December of 2005, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report, following a two-and-a-half-year investigation, that found tap water in forty-two states was contaminated with 141 chemicals for which the government had failed to set safety standards. That’s 141 contaminants in addition to the 114 already under scrutiny. (Others suggest the sky’s the limit when it comes to unregulated contaminants—industry pumps out new ones faster than regulating agencies can test them.) The unregulated contaminants are linked to cancer, reproductive toxicity, developmental toxicity, and immune system damage. They come from industry (plasticizers, solvents, and propellants), from agriculture (fertilizer and pesticide ingredients), from development (runoff polluted by auto emissions and lawn chemicals, and effluent from sewage treatment plants), and from water treatment itself. Yes, cleaning up the water to decrease microbial illness—with chlorine, chloramines, ozone, and other chemicals—can cause problems of its own, in some cases increasing the risk of cancer and developmental and reproductive disorders. It’s enough to make a tap lover cry.
Still, Arthur Ashendorf, a former head of New York City’s drinking-water-quality program, dismisses the EWG report as “crazy.” He adds, “There’s always someone looking for something wrong.” Cynthia Dougherty, director of the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, agrees that source water needs more protection, but found the report “overstates the need for concern” and “raises unnecessary alarm.” The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute calls the report nothing but “hype” because the contaminants “appear infrequently at such low levels that it makes them inconsequential.”
Unfortunately, that isn’t always true. Scientists are learning that smaller and smaller amounts of chemicals are anything but inconsequential; that exposure to minute traces of the wrong chemical at the wrong time—at critical stages of fetal or child development, for example—can cause more harm than large doses later in life. Moreover, none of these contaminants come to us solo, like a single coffee ground floating in a glass of water. In forty-two states, people drink tap water that contains at least ten different pollutants on the same day. Looking at end points that include immune and reproductive system dysfunctions and neurological, cognitive, and behavioral effects—instead of just cancer—researchers are finding that mixtures of chemicals can induce these effects in much smaller concentrations than do single chemicals, and that low-level exposure can often induce results not seen at higher levels.
If scientists know there’s potential trouble in our drinking water, why isn’t the government doing anything? In fact, the EPA has a list of fifty-one microbial and chemical contaminants that it’s considering regulating. But it’s expensive to identify and detect these contaminants, to determine their health effects, and then to treat the water. Any changes are likely to require massive capital projects with long lead times—exactly the sort of projects that drinking-water plant managers, concerned with meeting current state standards, are unlikely to propose to their boss, who’s usually an elected official. Moreover, any ultimate improvements in drinking water are unlikely to be noticed by the folks who will end up paying for it. All in all, not a formula for improvement.
At the tail end of the nineties, the USGS began using highly sensitive assays to test American waterways