What's In Your Water?
So you walk to your refrigerator to reach for another bottled water before your work out, but to your disappointment, you realize you’ve run out! What do you do? Make an emergency trip to the grocery store? Hope to pass by a few water fountains during your run, or do you *dun dun dun* fill your water bottle with tap water? What’s in your tap water, anyway? Is bottled water really healthier? And what’s all this about water quality? Read on…
What is Water Quality?
This definition could get pretty hefty, but, in layman’s terms, the quality of water is simply its suitability for a particular use (drinking, for instance) based on its physical, chemical, and biological characteristics.
There are many threats to drinking water, including improperly disposed of chemicals, animal and human wastes, pesticides, wastes injected deep underground, and even naturally-occurring substances. Drinking water that is not properly treated or travels through an improperly maintained distribution system may pose serious health risks. For these reasons, the Safe Drinking Water Act (or SDWA, passed by Congress in 1974) authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set national health-based standards for drinking water to protect it against both naturally-occurring and man-made contaminants that may be found in drinking water. The EPA, States, and water systems then work together to make sure that these standards are met.
What’s in Atlanta’s Water?
Each day, Atlanta water systems provide approximately 120 million gallons of treated drinking water to nearly 1 million residents in the metro area. All of this water comes from the Chattahoochee River. As stated by the City of Atlanta’s Water Drinking Bureau, each year, the city conducts more than 50,000 tests to screen for more than 150 contaminants, which may include the following, prior to treatment:
- Microbial Contaminants such as bacteria and viruses that may come from sewage treatment plants, agricultural livestock, and/or wildlife
- Inorganic Contaminants such as salts and metals, which may occur naturally, or are a result of industrial discharges and oil and gas production
- Pesticides and herbicides which generally come from residential and agricultural use
- Organic chemical contaminants including volatile organic chemicals which are manmade byproducts, usually resulting from mining and the production of petroleum
Even after treatment and disinfection, water may still have some remnants of these contaminants. The levels found, however, will not surpass the maximum contaminant level (MCL, the level of a contaminant in drinking water below which there is no expected or known health risk). For instance, according to the 2008 Annual Water Quality Report, only 0.8 ppms of nitrogen were detected in our drinking water, while the MCL stands at 10.0ppms. The good news is that the levels of contaminants found in Atlanta drinking water have continued to be significantly lower than the MCLs set by the EPA. With such rigorous and frequent water testing occurring, Atlanta residents should rest easy while taking that drink of water from their faucets.
Tap versus Bottled
The Water
This actually becomes the issue of comparing FDA regulation to EPA regulation, and you may be surprised by what we found reported by the Natural Resource Defense Council. Check out some of the comparisons below:
- FDA regulation exempts bottled water that is packaged and sold within the same state. This constitutes for more than 70% of all bottled water.
- Tap water has an E. Coli Maximum Contaminant Level of 0%, set by the EPA. There is no such regulation set by the FDA for bottled water.
- The EPA has set a federal requirement for tap water filtration and disinfection. The FDA leaves this regulation in the hands of the states, with no federal interference.
- Bottled water plants test for coliform bacteria once per week, 4 times per month. Tap water plants test for this growth more than 100 times per month.
- The EPA requires drinking water quality results to be reported and made available to the public (for example, the annual water quality report linked above). There is no such requirement for bottled water.
Since bottled water packaged and sold within the same state is regulated by the State, we thought it would be interesting to find out about Georgia’s regulations. After contacting the Georgia Department of Agriculture, we were directed to a few public documents, available on their website. Concerning water quality, Georgia has set regulation in accordance with EPA regulation. The Bottled Water Certification form requests results of the same contaminants tested for by the EPA, however, unlike tap water test results, bottled water test results are not made available to the public. These results are submitted directly from the water plant to the Department of Agriculture, and any correspondence concerning their compliance is undisclosed.
The Bottle
The Container Recycling Institute reported that over 14 billion water bottles are sold annually in the United States. Yet, only 10% of those bottles are recycled. This translates to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste in our landfills and seas. And did you know that it takes about 1.85 gallons of water to make a plastic bottle that will contain a mere 20 ounces? Go figure! With all of this in mind, we hope you’ll reconsider the next time you walk down that bottled water aisle.
Conserve it!
With Atlanta just recently overcoming one of its most drastic droughts, we’ve all learned a thing or two about the importance of conserving our water. But did you know that residents are responsible for more than half of Atlanta’s water consumption? View the charts below for more details. The chart on the right portrays the amount of water use each of our household actions accounts for.
To help us minimize our household water consumption, Former Mayor Shirley Franklin left us with a few tips for residential water conservation. Simply click on the link below to find them: