Do you use a water filter?
Posted
Friday, March 14, 2008 4:59 PM
Did you see the frightening headlines this week about pharmaceuticals in tap water? Apparently small amounts of drugs (everything from birth control pills to anti-psychotics to cancer drugs) have found their way into our water supply. Experts can’t agree on how dangerous the drugs are in these tiny doses, and it doesn’t sound like anybody knows quite how to filter them out, so I think this falls under the category of “scary things it’s not worth worrying about" but it did get me thinking about water filters.
I interviewed a few environmental experts on the subject not long ago and they said that an inexpensive “carbon activated” filter (a Britta pitcher, or something similar) is all that you need to filter out most of the dangerous stuff your tap water might be laced with (things like metals, chlorine and pesticides). I was way relieved to hear that, because I’d been using nothing but the Britta for years. But this whole drugs-from-the-faucet thing started me obsessing, so I looked up my local water company on this database of national tap water quality and learned that 46 scary contaminants have been found in my local H20. (It’s easy to do, just type in your zip code and you should be able to see test results for you area, with links to information about each of the contaminants). So I’m wondering if I should invest in a more serious water filter. I know that a filtration process called “reverse osmosis” (an under-the-sink filter) is supposed to be one of the best, but that it wastes a lot of water in the process of cleaning it, so I don’t like the sound of that. Does anybody use on that they’re happy with?
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that bottled water often isn’t any safer or more pure than tap. In fact, tap water is much more regulated than bottled water, and some of the leading brands of bottled water are just re-packaged tap water anyway. So, in addition to being awful for the environment (all those discarded plastic bottles, and all the CO2 emitted producing and delivering them) a bottled water habit does nothing to protect you.
If you’ve installed a water filter in your home (something more serious than my plastic pitcher) I would love to hear about it!