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Water Filters

The Backstory

Many of us rely on our state and local officials to ensure that the water coming out of our taps is clean and safe. They test water quarterly for synthetic organic chemicals and hundreds of times a month for bacteria, and municipal testing is actually more stringent than that required for bottled water, which is only tested annually. Nevertheless, a few localized problems with municipal supplies cast doubt on the entire nation's, leading consumers to opt for bottled water. Popular also because it's more convenient and may taste better, bottled water still costs 1,000 times more per gallon than tap, isn't as closely regulated and contributes to a host of environmental hazards.

Environmental Issues

Bottled water consumes 1.5 million barrels of oil annually in the production of convenient, disposable, petroleum-based plastics. Even though most plastic water bottles are recyclable, they're usually thrown out. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that each day, more than 60 million plastic bottles are incinerated or tossed in landfills.

Meanwhile, the contents of those bottles may be no different than the water coming out of your tap. As much as 40 percent of bottled water is actually drawn from municipal water supplies. PepsiCo has recently admitted as much by labeling it's Aquafina as coming from "a public water source" and then shipped cross-country, spewing greenhouse gases and burning more non-renewable oil in the process.

Water filters themselves create solid waste in the form of disposed plastic cartridges, which add to landfill problems. Unfortunately, water filters aren't recyclable and manufacturers currently don't have take-back programs designed to keep used water filters out of landfills.

Personal Health

People often turn to bottles because of threats to municipal supplies, the greatest of which is development, whether agricultural or urban, around reservoirs. Urban development seals green spaces under impervious roadways and parking lots, resulting in increased pollution from topsoil, lawn pesticides and fertilizers, animal and human waste (especially if septic systems fail), roadway oil, soot, landfill run-off and salt. Additionally, agricultural run-off carries pesticides into water supplies. A February 2007 U.S. Geological Survey survey of 51 "hydrological systems" found that one or more pesticides have been detected in 97 percent of U.S. streams in urban and farming areas, and five percent of shallow wells that provide drinking water in urban areas have pesticide concentrations above EPA human-health benchmarks.

Aside from industrial and agricultural pollution, chemicals not removed from wastewater treatment plants can infiltrate water supplies as well. A May 2002 USGS study of the nation's stream water discovered chemicals found in drugs, detergents, disinfectants, insect repellents, plastics and personal care products, including 33 suspected hormone disruptors. Non-prescription drugs were detected more frequently than almost all other organic wastewater contaminants, and those drugs have been detected in drinking-water supplies in Montana and New Jersey.

The EPA reported in 1998 that 6 percent of the country's water systems had violated health standards for at least one of 90 regulated contaminants that year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an estimated seven million Americans are made sick annually by contaminated tap water; in some rare cases, this results in death. One study published in the 2006 Journal of Water and Health found that, between 1991 and 2002, 4,400 people were hospitalized and 50 died from exposure to pathogens such as Cryptosporidium and E.coli in tap water.