Report: Unsafe Tap Water Still Legal

Of 60,000 Chemicals Use to Treat Drinking Water, Just 91 are Regulated By Feds, According to NY Times Investigation.  

Outdated laws regulating tap water allow unhealthy water to remain legal, according to a New York Times special report.

As the latest installment of its "Toxic Waters" series, the Times explores how of the 60,000 chemicals used to treat the public's water supply, just 91 are regulated by the federal government.

And no new chemicals have been added to the list created by the Safe Water Drinking Act since 2000. Most of the laws from the act, which was created in 1974, are also out of date.

As the newspaper reports:

"All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available."

"People don't understand that just because water is technically legal, it can still present health risks," Dr. Pankaj Parekh, who oversees water quality for Los Angeles, told the Times.

Chemicals such as arsenic and mercury, which can lead to a variety of cancers, and manganese, which is linked to Parkinson's disease, were found in municipal water supplies by the Times.

"There's growing evidence that numerous chemicals are more dangerous than previously thought, but the E.P.A. still gives them a clean bill of health," Linda S. Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, told the Times, adding that these chemicals can live in body tissue for years before affecting people.

But at least one head of a city's water system was unfazed.

Though data show the Pensacola, Fla. water supply had several dangerously high levels of chemicals, it has not violated the Safe Water Drinking Act in recent years.

As the executive director of Emerald Coast Utilities Authority tells the Times: "If it doesn't violate the law, I don't really pay much attention to it."

More expensive than gasoline, is bottled water worth it?

Bottled water is getting a bad rap lately.

There are many areas of the country that have good tap water, yet bottled water sales continue to climb. In most places, bottled water costs more than gasoline (in a gallon-to-gallon comparison). Most of the extra cost is due to packaging and transportation.

This is where the environmental activists step in. They say the extra packaging and shipping of bottled water uses fossil fuels and contributes to global warming.

A 2006 report by the Earth Policy Institute (EPI) states that the most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. “Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.”

And of course, shipping the water across the country, or importing from overseas, uses up gasoline and diesel fuel. Then there's the waste.

“According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter,” the EPI report notes. “Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.”

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