What’s In You Tap Water? America’s Water Supply Exposed

A simple Google search for the keyword "tap water contamination" yields over half a million results. Unless you've been living in Grizzly Adams' cabin for the past five years you have been inundated with all sorts of reports and studies ringing the danger bell on Americas tap water quality.

It all started in 2005, when the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) tested municipal tap water in 42 states and detected some 260 contaminants in public water supplies. Of those tap water contaminants, 141 were unregulated chemicals for which public health officials have no safety standards, much less methods for removing them.

The cat was out of the bag forcing America's bureaucrats like Carol Browner, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chief to say "The way we guarantee safe drinking water is broken and needs to be fixed."

The fact is that today in our industrialized society we use over 75,000 toxic chemicals, and over 1000 new ones are developed each year. We have learned the hard way that any chemical we use will eventually wind up in the water we drink. There is no "new water," the planet just keeps reusing and recycling the same water over and over. Our water treatment plants are not designed to remove these synthetic chemicals, and as a result we find traces of health-threatening contaminants in most of our public water supplies.

The new inconvenient truth is that America's tap water treatment facilities do not remove synthetic organic chemicals (SOC) and typically consist only of sand bed filtration and disinfection‚ much like a standard swimming pool filter. For the most part‚ today‘s tap water treatment facilities are much the same as they were at the turn of the century; the standard remains to filter out the visible particles and add bleach! There are almost 170,000 public water systems in the United States most of them in bad need of upgrades and water quality protocol revisions.

When it comes to tap water regulations things are not any better either. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for regulating tap water in America, has required water suppliers to test tap water for approximately 200 unregulated contaminants over the past 30 years. But the Agency's own scientists have identified 600 chemicals in tap water formed as by-products of; the same scientists tracked some 220 million pounds of 650 industrial chemicals discharged to rivers and streams each year; and spearheaded research on emerging contaminants after the U.S. Geological Survey found 82 unregulated pharmaceuticals and personal care product chemicals in rivers and streams across the country that provide drinking water for millions of Americans. All told, EPA has set safety standards for fewer than 20 percent of the many hundreds of chemicals that it has identified in Americas tap water.

The alternatives to drinking raw tap water are not any more promising. In fact when it comes to alternatives like bottled water the situation is even more depressing and gloomy.

Not only bottled water is less safe and clean than tap water but one must also acknowledge the enormous environmental issues stemming from the manufacturing, transportation and disposal of almost 700 million plastic bottles per year.

Fortunately, our best course of action against tap water contamination lies within our own powers: home water purification systems.

Again, there is a host of possibilities "out there" when it comes to home water filtration. Some are presented through very sophisticated advertising that mostly employs fear mongering and fancy chemical terms or long-lettered research credentials of "field authorities".

The bottom line is this: one must choose the home water filtration that is wallet friendly, effective and maintenance free.

Under this pretext, the obvious choice would be a water ionizer. The long term financial and health benefits far outweigh every other method in the market today. Since outlining the water ionizer benefits is beyond the scope of this article, I invite you to visit http://www.e-waterionizers.com to see for yourselves why alkaline ionized water is our best defense against America's increasingly scary water supply.