Water You Thinking!?! Use Tap!

For this blog assignment, I’m going to talk about the pros and cons between tap and bottled water, and discuss various topics about the tap water from where I live (Riverside). To start, my homes tap water comes from groundwater resources pumped from local area wells in the Bunker Hill, San Bernardino, and Riverside Basins. On average, Riverside public utilities customers use roughly 70 million gallons of water every day, so this leaves us with one question to answer, Is the Riverside water safe to drink?

            In fact, the Riverside tap water is safe to drink, thankfully.

The water delivered to your water meter meets or surpasses all state and federal standards for drinking water quality. This means that the water is safe to use without further treatment. Though, water customers are responsible for plumbing and treatment devices installed on their properties. This means that illegal, old, incorrectly installed and improperly maintained plumbing or water treatment devices may harm, alter, or negatively affect the water quality before it comes out of the water faucets at your home or business. A list of National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) approved water treatment devices and plumbing materials is available by calling the NSF at (800) 673-8010.

Each year Riverside public utilities takes over 17,000 samples to test for more than 200 possible contaminants in our water system. Samples are collected at along transmission pipelines throughout the distribution system, including reservoirs and booster stations, and the seven regional treatment plants. A private laboratory certified by the California Department of Public Health then rigorously tests Riverside’s water. On top of that, the testing lab is evaluated annually to ensure its ability to effectively perform the testing.

            Some disinfectants, such as chlorine and chloramines, stop bacteria from growing in water pipelines. But not to worry, as it is safe for even kidney dialysis patients to drink water with chlorine and chloramines. This is because the digestive process neutralizes the disinfectants before they reach the bloodstream, meaning that water with these chemicals is safe for everyone from people with diabetes, to infants and even birds. Though, in the dialysis process, chlorine and chloramines are toxic in dialysis water and must be taken out of the water used in kidney dialysis machines. Individuals on kidney dialysis machines with further questions can contact their healthcare provider for more information. (http://www.riversideca.gov/utilities/water-wqr.asp)

Tap water standards are created by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and are enforced through the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). The EPA sets legal limits on the levels of certain contaminants in drinking water which can be found on their website, http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/. Some of these regulations consist of chemical contaminant regulations, microbial contaminants, and methodology of regulations.

            So, now that we have a general understand of tap water, what about bottled water? Well, bottled water standards are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, otherwise known as the FDA. Though tap and bottled water are much different for various environmental reasons, the regulations actually happen to be quite synonymous. By this I mean the underlying theme happens to pertain to chemical regulation and safety. For example, some standards deal with the processing and bottling regulations, coliform, uranium, nickel, and disinfectant byproducts.

            After conducting further research, it appears that the tap water industries are subject to more frequent inspections and testing compared to bottled water, therefore, their criteria is more strict. Lastly, to support this, tap water must report their results to the general public, but on the other hand, bottled water has no requirement to do so.

           

Lastly for this blog, I want to point out that not only do bottled water companies have fewer regulations, but they also have more environmental effects. For example, a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature found that 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year. This, obviously, would not happen with tap water. So, cant we just solve this issue by reusing and recycling bottles? Well, unfortunately reusing plastic bottles further compromises the quality of the water, due to the fact that more and more phthalate leaches its way into the water, as the bottle gets older. All in all, its more safe for us, and the environment, if people can just use tap water. (http://www.allaboutwater.org/environment.html)