Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [96]
With the “human right” and “commodity” camps at a Mexican standoff (tempered voices for compromise occupy the middle ground), the question remains: What is safe to drink? In October 2008, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group, analyzed ten brands of bottled water and found in them thirty-eight different “pollutants,” including disinfection byproducts, pharmaceuticals, bacteria, nitrate, fluoride, plasticizers, and total dissolved solids. Were the levels higher than those allowed in tap? No (except for in California, which has more stringent rules for disinfection byproducts in bottled water), but the information gave pause to many who drink their favorite brand for its presumption of purity. The media widely reported the test results, and the tap-drinking blogosphere gloated. A spokesperson from Nestlé, which produced one of the private-label purified waters that was tested, offered the rebuttal, “While tap water is generally adequate and safe, from a quality and other perspectives [sic], bottled water is better on every score.”
All of a sudden, “we don’t compete with tap” was so yesterday.
That doesn’t mean that tap water is necessarily winning the competition. Nestlé touts its product’s superiority, libertarians are running down tap, and even Benjamin Grumbles, then the assistant administrator for water at the EPA, hedged on public water’s excellence, noting in an in-house video the industrial contaminants and pathogens that could be in tap before it’s treated. Almost every week since this book was first published, another community, neighborhood, or school suffered a boil-water alert. Pipes were breaking; lab tests showed E. coli, lead, or industrial chemicals in tap water. In 2007, the number of community water systems that met or exceeded federal safedrinking-water standards slipped to 88.9 percent from the previous year’s 89.3 percent; the good news is that the number of households receiving that sub-par water dipped from nearly 29 million to 24 million.
Millions more, of course, are still exposed to perchlorate in their drinking water. After years of study, the EPA in the fall of 2008 made a preliminary determination not to regulate the pollutant, a component of rocket fuel, in drinking water (Massachusetts and California have their own standards for perchlorate); the agency will issue its final determination after a public-comment period. In other chemical news, the FDA, after first declaring the estrogen-mimicking chemical bisphenol A safe (based largely on studies funded by industry), convened a study group to reexamine the growing body of data that says it isn’t. The Canadian government added bisphenol A to the country’s list of toxic substances, and “BPA-free” has become a common feature of hard plastic water bottles sold in the United States. The IBWA continues to defend the use of BPA in five-gallon water jugs.
And what about fixing our pipes? We still don’t have a dedicated fund for water, separate from the yearly appropriations process, to support clean-water infrastructure, but President Obama did provide $7.4 billion in his early 2009 stimulus package for drinking water infrastructure and wastewater utilities. There’s still a $22-billion-a-year shortfall to maintain municipal water systems, according to the EPA, but this appropriation is a big step toward protecting the stuff we drink, and it’s a terrific stimulus for green-collar jobs in construction and watershed protection.
(My two cents: Where possible, let’s look at designing less engineered, more holistic systems that allow the earth to retain and filter storm water, and in some places use plants, microorganisms, invertebrates, and other aquatic creatures to clean and filter water for reuse. Such “restorative water hydrologies,” to borrow a phrase from the environmental group Clean Water Action, include rain barrels, roof gardens, and swales that slow and retain storm water; ponds and wetlands that filter sewage; and digestors that recover energy