Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [87]
When American Rivers and dozens of other watershed groups across the country polled a thousand voters on their attitudes about drinking water, a large majority wanted elected officials to take action to clean up polluted waters rather than have consumers adjust to problems by buying bottled water. It blows my mind that the groups even had to ask.
For now, what should we be drinking? The EPA tells us that the United States has one of the safest water supplies in the world. “I wouldn’t hesitate to drink tap water anywhere in the country,” Cynthia Dougherty, director of the EPA’s Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water, says. Drink a glass of water in any city in the United States, Dr. Ronald B. Linsky of the National Water Research Institute said in “Avoiding Rate Shock: Making the Case for Water Rates,” a report published by the American Water Works Association, and you “have a very, very high assurance of safe, high-quality drinking water.” If you fall into no risk category, says the NRDC, you can drink most cities’ tap water without a problem.
Statements like these confirm my personal bias: that water should be locally sourced, delivered by energy-efficient, publicly owned pipes, generate close to zero waste, and cost, for eight glasses a day, about forty-nine cents a year. Buy that water in bottles and you’d be spending $1,400.
But it isn’t that simple: if it were, 20 percent of Americans wouldn’t drink only bottled water. In 2006, 89.3 percent of the nation’s nearly fifty-three thousand community water systems were in compliance with more than ninety EPA standards. That left 29.8 million people with water that missed the mark on either health or reporting standards, or both. (Many in this group live on Indian lands, and many drink from small systems, which have the most trouble meeting regulations.) Moreover, neither the EPA nor your water utility has anything to say about the condition of the pipes in your house. And then there are those risk categories.
“Right to know” reports advise the very young, the pregnant, the very old, or the immunocompromised (for example, people who are HIV-positive or undergoing chemotherapy) to consult with their doctors before drinking tap water, even in communities where water gets high marks. Some scientists define the at-risk population even more broadly, to include not just babies but children and teens, lactating women, and anyone over fifty-five. “Look at your annual report, then decide, based on your personal situation, if you need to do anything different,” Dougherty says.
What’s the big concern? It depends whom you ask; when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Scientists who study lead worry about lead. Scientists who study the connection between chemicals and cancer worry about disinfection by-products. Microbiologists worry about tiny bugs.
Studies by epidemiologists indicate that at least seven million Americans experience gastrointestinal illnesses from waterborne microbes each year, of whom a thousand die. “Different people react to the same environment in different ways,” says Ronnie D. Levin, a longtime EPA employee who is also a visiting scientist in the water and health program at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There is no bright golden line that says there’s no risk.” Seven million is too many, Levin says. “I did a cost-benefit analysis and I think we can do better than that, without increasing the amount of disinfectants in the water.”
Levin is wary of using more chlorine and other disinfectants because they generate disinfection by-products, “none of which are good.” Her solution? Require utilities that rely on surface water to filter it first, to remove organic contaminants, and then to disinfect, instead of the other way around.
Until those utilities retrofit, I ask Levin, what about bottled water?
There is uncertainty about that too, she says. “It really comes down