Let’s explore the world of water ~

Where do you live? Do you know where your home’s tap water comes from? I live in Riverside, and my home’s tap water comes from groundwater system. According to Riverside Public Utilities’s Water Quality Annual Report, Riverside’s water begins as rain and snow that touches down in our local foothills and mountains and flows down through the earth into underground aquifers. With every storm, these water sources, located throughout the Riverside and San Bernardino basins, receive new water that is filtered through percolation, a naturally occurring purification process. They are saying that water in Riverside is safe to drink because water surpasses all state and federal standard set by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA). Also, they are saying that we do not need to filter our tap water to make it drinkable because a safe amount of chlorine is used to purify your water and prevent harmful bacteria and viruses from growing in water. The smell that one can smell from the tap water is because of chlorine. Although the Riverside Public Utilities say that the tap water is safe to drink. I personally do not want to drink because it seems not purified. The tap water in my house has some grey color and some smell like pool. I cannot believe that it is safe to drink, so I would drink bottled water.

Who is in charge of the standard of tap water and bottled water?

In 1996, the U.S. Federal Government re-enacted the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). This act sets the minimum quality standards for municipal drinking water throughout the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the responsibility to set the minimum standards on a national level. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set standards for bottled water based on EPA standards. Although bottled water, for the most part, is used for drinking water, it is considered a food product and is subject to the regulations guiding food stuffs.

Bottled water is convenient because one can basically just go to the grocery shopping and buy it. However, there are some concerns that the package of bottled water which is a bottle has been wasted because not all people recycle it.

Here are some problems with bottled water in environment.

• Plastic bottle production in the United States annually requires about 17.6 million barrels of oil.
• Worldwide bottling of water uses about 2.7 million tons of plastic each year.
• Transporting bottled water to market produces air pollution and emissions of carbon dioxide which contribute to global warming.
• The energy it takes to transport the water to market, to chill the bottles, and collect the empties is the energy equivalent of filling each bottle a quarter of the way with oil.
• About 86 percent of empty plastic water bottles in the United States land in the garbage instead of being recycled. That amounts to about two million tons of PET plastic bottles piling up in U.S. landfills each year.
• Many plastic bottles end up being incinerated, releasing toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash laden with heavy metals into the air.