Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

Yesterday's AP memories about contaminated ingesting water elements gave me pause. If you're residing underneath a rock and overlooked the day gone by's story right here's the quickie re-cap.

The Federal Government studied, for the first time, the presence of pharmaceuticals in drinking water supplies in 28 metro areas around the country. This should come as no surprise to anyone. But of course it was met with the usual chorus of hand wringing and paranoia. The science of this scientific study will be cast aside in favor of quick fixes and feel-good policy changes. Lost in the shuffle will be the fact that there are no quick fixes and that there is even less to feel good about.

That have a look at says as a great deal approximately how particular the technological know-how of finding wildly diluted lines of substances has end up as it does about the state of ingesting water within the US. Someone mentioned to me lately that worrying approximately infinitesimally small traces of ibuprofen in my consuming water makes as tons feel as fear about how plenty dog feces I'm ingesting whenever my neighbor runs his leaf blower.

So if the lines of prescription drugs that display up in faucet water aren't concept to be dangerous immediately, it's worth reading how they got there.

I study a examine a yr ago from the University of Washington that observed extended traces of cinnamon and vanilla in Puget Sound that peaked between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Who knows what, if any, deviltry the ones materials can get into while they are released into the environment. But that they are there's a canary inside the coal mine if not anything else. Ditto the prescribed drugs.

Modern sewage remedy flora trace their lineage to structures invented in London to get sewage out of the metropolis and into the ocean as quickly and unstinkily as feasible. The sewage structures these days still do the identical issue, only now they filter the poop first. This by the way, is the handiest element they're designed to take away. Treated sewage with the poop removed is judged to be safe after which discharged into the closest frame of water. No one seems for something other than the poop whilst judging whether or not the water is considered to be "easy sufficient."

Since poop is all that may be filtered out, some thing it truly is no longer poop (and dissolved) is still there. Pour Drain-o down the sink and it finally ends up inside the Bay a couple of days later. Flush away an expired prescription and you might as properly be on foot down the street and dumping it into the Gulf immediately due to the fact that's in which your Xanax, Ambien or Zoloft come to be.

In Tampa's case, Tampa treats its sewage and dumps the "easy" water into the Bay. Tampa additionally has a desalination plant that sucks water out of the Bay and makes consuming water out of it. True, there is no poop in it anymore while it hits the intake pipes of the desal plant, but it nevertheless has its Xanax, Ambien and Zoloft. Cities no longer located close to a frame of salt water do the equal issue best without a desal plant. Chicago dumps its treated sewage into the lake and then receives its ingesting water from the same lake. What's that word again? Oh yeah. UNSUSTAINABLE.

That tale the day past will come as welcome news to the bottled water industry who already has the loads duped into believing that there's something inherently higher about water in a bottle rather than water from a tap. This is a lie, a damned lie.

40 percent of the bottled water sold in the US is tap water with a brand name on it
1.5 million barrels of imported oil gets turned into those convenient plastic bottles every year
Those plastic bottles can't be re-used
US tap water is the safest supply in the world
Bottled water is essentially untested and unregulated
These bullets could go on for days and all of them would say that bottled water is a bad idea