Here's a great article detailing where we are, and where we need to go:
http://www.alternet.org/water/95630/what_i...nk/?page=entire
QUOTE
The fact is, 89.3 percent of the nation's community water systems met or exceeded federal standards in 2007 (down from 92 percent in 2006). It sounds good, but that still leaves more than 29 million people drinking water that missed the mark on either health or reporting standards.
...
Does a retreat to the bottle make sense? Hardly.
First, bottled water isn't necessarily more healthful than tap. The Food and Drug Administration allows in bottled water basically the same levels of contaminants the EPA allows in tap water. Contaminants that go unregulated by the EPA -- such as perchlorate or MTBE, a gasoline additive - also go unregulated by the FDA. While utility customers can learn the results of testing from annual reports, bottlers aren't required to reveal the results of either their self-testing or their far less frequent independent inspections.
As an EPA employee told me, with bottled water "it's a crapshoot what you're getting." Another difference: bottled water is tested at the plant, not after it's been sitting in plastic for up to two years. Chemicals from bottles have been shown to leach into water over time.
...
Does a retreat to the bottle make sense? Hardly.
First, bottled water isn't necessarily more healthful than tap. The Food and Drug Administration allows in bottled water basically the same levels of contaminants the EPA allows in tap water. Contaminants that go unregulated by the EPA -- such as perchlorate or MTBE, a gasoline additive - also go unregulated by the FDA. While utility customers can learn the results of testing from annual reports, bottlers aren't required to reveal the results of either their self-testing or their far less frequent independent inspections.
As an EPA employee told me, with bottled water "it's a crapshoot what you're getting." Another difference: bottled water is tested at the plant, not after it's been sitting in plastic for up to two years. Chemicals from bottles have been shown to leach into water over time.
This about says it all:
QUOTE
Clean drinking water is an index of a functioning society: more than a billion people worldwide lack sufficient access to clean water, and more than 5 million a year die from waterborne diseases. The United States still has one of the best water systems in the developed world: it would be criminal to run it into the ground.
I want to go back to the days when I could be confident that drinking out of a damn garden hose was safe.
