Environmental Question #10 [Tap Water]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/binders4588

Q: Drinking water. Is tap water better than bottled? What’s the best way to get drinking water with the least amount of harm? I lived in a developing country as a Peace Corps volunteer and after that experience came back to U.S. with such an appreciation for our “clean” tap water. But after Flint and the rising studies on microplastics, drugs, etc in tap water I’m again back to thinking my daily water intake from the tap is going to slowly give me cancer or other issues.

A: Tap water is totally safe basically everywhere in the US, with a few exceptions like you mentioned in Flint. If you get your water from a municipal system then it has been thoroughly filtered and cleaned by your local government before it reaches your home, and they generally do a very good job. If you get your water directly from a well, then it depends more on your area, but you can still clean it up plenty with a typical well filtration system. Either way if you're nervous about it, it can't hurt to put a filter on your tap if it would make you feel better. Although remember that filters expire for a reason, the filter can get moldy on the inside over time and you of course don't want to drink that.  

It makes me sad how much the Flint crisis damaged Americans' trust in their tap water, since Americans are so lucky to have such clean water. The Flint water crisis was caused by multiple layers of stupidity that generally don't align to all happen at once, especially not now that every water authority in the country is hyper vigilant because of Flint. In Flint most of their old water pipes are made of lead, and several decades ago it was decided that it would be cheaper to coat the inside of the pipes in a special kind of paint to prevent the lead from leaching into the water than it would be to replace hundreds of miles of pipes (since the individual lead pipes were also within people's homes). For decades the paint did its job and no lead leached out, until the local government decided they could get cheaper water from a different local waterway that happened to be slightly more acidic than the water they had been using. The paint wasn't designed to handle that level of acidity, so the more acidic water ate away at the paint and lead started to get into the water. All of this was so stupid though, because the crisis wouldn't have happened if Flint had replaced the pipes in the first place, and it also wouldn't have happened if they had checked the pH of the new water source before switching sources. They had plenty of opportunities to avoid the problem, but instead the water crisis occurred due to decades of negligence. The Flint government did a spectacularly bad job for an unacceptably long amount of time, and most of the time the stars don't align to create such perfectly horrible circumstances.

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