Worries About Unregulated Contaminants in Tap Water

My brother forwarded to me today a Chicago Tribune article about Chicago water. It mentioned that traces of pharmaceuticals and other unregulated substances were found in treated Lake Michigan water in the last year. It's worth a read, especially because Chicago is probably not the only city with this problem - concerns about other cities' drinking water have also been written about by other publications.

This Spring, I read the report my city posted for 2008 and saw that it was testing for some unregulated contaminants. It said, "the purpose of unregulated contaminant monitoring is to assist EPA in determining the occurrence of unregulated contaminants in drinking water and whether future regulation is warranted." None of the eight items my city tested reported at the high end of the "Range of Detects".

For more information on ground water and drinking water, visit the EPA's website.

If you have seen your city water's test results, had your own tap water tested (none of the kits I've seen mention testing for pharmaceuticals, but I have seen pesticides listed) and remain uncomfortable about its quality, you still have other options aside from buying bottled water.

The most popular choices appear to be:

• Reverse Osmosis - draws water through a very fine membrane. Very thorough but expensive relative to other options. Removes fluoride, too, so take this into account if you have kids.
• Activated Carbon - removes impurities as water passes through the filter. Inexpensive, lots of kinds available, easty to install, slow, not as thorough as RO.
• Distillation - water is purified through evaporation and condensation. Effectively removes many contaminants from water but it does not filter out contaminants that boil at a lower temperature than water (and, hence, go up in the vapor along with the water).
  
• Ultraviolet Light - living organisms in the water are killed by ultraviolet light. It does not filter out other contaminants.