Another Gift to the Bottled Water Industry? Let's Hope Not!

Elizabeth Royte has an excellent post on pollutants in drinking water - most recently, the herbicide atrazine - and the boost it may provide to the bottled water industry. She is not arguing that we turn off the tap and head for the Fiji or whatever, but this does pose a dilemma for those of us concerned with the increasing number of chemicals found in our drinking water: what do we drink?

As she eloquently indicates, bottled water is expensive, even if we discount its environmental footprint (which we should not).  What about tap filters? Those can work, but remember they don't destroy the chemicals, but just remove it from the water. Filters actually concentrate the stuff, and require proper disposal of the spent filtration medium (usually pulverized carbon).  Filter users may just be transferring the problem elsewhere or 'recycling' the pollutant.

[Here is an article by Danielle Ivory about water utilities' lack of filters for atrazine - thanks to Dorian Roffe-Hammond for sending this along.]

What concerns me about all this is that we may lose the political will to maintain our municipal drinking water systems and the surface watersheds and aquifers that provide the water. That could occur if more and more people decide to forego tap water altogether and drink bottled water. If that's the case, then more than our drinking water will suffer. 

If we do lose the will to maintain municipal water systems, then we will have come full circle. In the USA, starting around 100 or so years ago, one of the cogent arguments for constructing municipal drinking water systems was that they would improve health by providing clean, safe drinking water. Business leaders bought into the idea because they were convinced workers would lose fewer days to sickness, thereby increasing productivity and profits. Later on came wastewater treatment. It all worked - diseases like cholera and typhoid have all but disappeared from the USA.

Will the water make us sick again?

A slight digression: I once heard a person say that if you had to thank one profession for doing the most to improve our health, don't thank the medical profession, but the engineering profession. They built water and wastewater treatment facilities. There's quite a bit of truth to that.

As for 20-20 hindsight, I wish I'd paid more attention in Chem 201-202 (organic chemistry) in 1967-68 (you were right, Dr. Hill!), although in some ways, I'm glad I didn't. Ignorance may be bliss, but unfortunately, what you don't know can hurt you.

"The road to disaster is paved with assumptions." -- Unknown

Comments

[Michael]

Hi, Tim.

Thanks for your comments.

I did not mean to give the impression that I was comparing atrazine with waterborne diseases in terms of making us 'sick'.

What I was trying to convey was the belief that if people think that municipal drinking water is no longer safe and are reluctant to invest in infrastructure maintenance and watershed protection because they prefer bottled water, then we may find ourselves dealing with diseases we thought had long since been eradicated.

That said, atrazine and other known/unknown chemical contaminants, although operating in ways quite different from pathogenic organisms, may not make us 'sick', but will impair future generations.

Either way, not a pretty sight.

[Tim]

Big difference: Cholera, typhoid and the like afflicted a large percentage of the people exposed, and quickly produced acute symptoms in most of those afflicted. Atrazine and other low-level pollutants, on the other hand, afflict such small proportions of those exposed that large epidemiological studies are needed just to identify an effect; and the effects aren't manifest until long after the initial exposure (Atrazine in particular doesn't even do much to adults, it affects the next generation). The harm caused by atrazine isn't of the same degree or kind as that caused by waterborne infectious disease. Even today, I'll bet more people are sickened by the occasional outbreaks of waterborne disease than by atrazine in tap water. (Remember the Giardia problems in Reno?)

Which is not to argue that atrazine isn't a problem; just that it isn't the same kind of problem, so it won't provoke the same kind of response. Business won't perceive a bottom-line benefit to removing atrazine from drinking water, since their employee productivity won't be affected. Ratepayers might be similarly balky when asked to pay for upgrades with no tangible benefit.

It seems obvious that the prudent course would be to stop dumping the stuff on the ground and in the water, but apparently the immediately perceptible benefits (fewer weeds, cheaper food) outweigh the difficult-to-see drawbacks.