"America’s latest drinking problem isn’t about alcohol,” opens an article in today’s Wall Street Journal .
Instead, reporter Anjali Athavaley suggests, Americans are freaking out over their drinking water, both bottled and tap.
For the past couple years, consumers have been returning to tap water over the bottled water that costs a lot, adversely impacts the environment (in terms of shipping and waste), and offers no greater purity or security than municipal water. However, recent reports about the presence of trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in local water have created a new reason to become verklempt about the whole issue.
Athavaley’s article covers the newest “pharmaceutical” scare, the types of filters that are available to consumers and the government regulations governing tap vs. bottled waters.
“A lot of bottled water is actually tap water, so there is no assurance that what is coming from the bottle is any safer than what is coming from the tap,” Sarah Janssen of the Natural Resources Defense Council says in the article.
Indeed, as this blog has often pointed out, tap water is tested more frequently and held to more stringent standards by the EPA, than bottled water, which is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Read more at WSJ, then hustle out to buy a Brita or PUR water filtration system.
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