Drinking water in plastic bottles contains countless particles too small to see. New research finds that people who drink water from them on a daily basis ingest far more microplastics than those who don’t.
These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.
Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.
Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.
Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
In basically the entire first world: yes, drinkable tap water is the norm. Even living in the middle of nowhere USA, you have well water and it is perfectly drinkable. (That is to say, rural American homes have their own well, water pump, and filtration system)
there’s really only pressure a few hours per week
Water towers are common and completely solve this issue. Even during power outages, gravity still works and water towers provide pressurized, drinkable water to everyone in the area.
You should look into getting a well installed. This is something you and your immediate neighbors could all benefit from and could go in together on if you can’t afford it yourself.
If you don’t mind me asking, what country do you live in? What you are saying is not something that is common in entire continents.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
Man this is spot on for the rural Philippines too, right down to the well details And the pathetic trickle of tap water for. Few hrs a day. At least it rains more in the Philippines I guess.
So cool to hear from lebanon… first world country mates dont really realize how much they take things for granted lol… things like 24/7 electricity and drinking tap water supply isnt rlly a thing in so many regions…
Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.
Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.
We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.
My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?
Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.
I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.
Yes, in a lot of places, the municipal water is perfectly fine to drink. We penalize people who contaminate the groundwater, and the infrastructure is maintained well enough.
We still have water main breaks that result in a boil-water order, because a break in the pipe means bacteria could enter, but I’ve never had one in any place I’ve lived in the US.
I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
I can’t specifically speak to watering golf courses as I’m not a golfsman (or whatever they’re called) but as far as washing floors and flushing toilets? In the west yes that is precious drinking water.
As you say you’re familiar with how the system works so you understand that it is far cheaper to have one system of infrastructure to deliver water and have all of that water be drinkable rather than have two sets of pipes where one delivers non-potable water for washing and flushing and one for just drinking water.
Is it wasteful to wash and flush with drinking water? Yeah maybe. Is it also wasteful to maintain two sets of infrastructure just to save drinking water? Also yes
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
As the other person said, yes on the former two, not really on the latter (though there are exceptions).
For an individual, everything is just the one, potable, water supply. Showers, clothes washing, drinking water, lawn watering (though most people don’t water their lawns, it’s expensive and grass grows just fine by itself). It is more complicated and expensive to deal with a secondary water system for homes to have a non-potable water system, so nobody does. One’s water bill is generally the cheapest utility bill.
Fire hydrants hook up to the potable system as well. As that is the only pressurized water that’s really available. Though, some places have taps into lakes and such for when the water system runs dry during large-scale fire-fighting. Think massive forest fires.
Farms, golf courses, data centers, nuclear plants, and other industrial uses generally have a secondary water source that isn’t potable. These are generally lightly treated well, river, or lake water. This is mostly for cost reasons as full water treatment gets pricey when you are using that much water.
Generally, we just plain don’t have water contamination like that. We have enough enforcement of groundwater protection, enough people that care to avoid contamination in the first place, and enough supply from groundwater or snowmelt that even if one source has minor contamination, we can switch to another until it’s remediated or within safe levels.
Which is also why we can afford to use potable water for those purposes. There’s enough of it to go around; it’s not precious here.
Well, except in California and the desert parts of the US, where they’re diverting so much of the Colorado river that the further down the river you go, it gets smaller instead of bigger, until sometimes there’s no river at all.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction
That’s actually a super interesting topic! In areas with aging infrastructure in first world countries, they intentionally up the mineral content of the water so it forms a second wall so to speak on top of the pipes, keeping it much more sanitary. (Paraphrased). Primarily for lead. Generally though, the constant flow of water running keeps things much cleaner than you might think.
My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.
Clay filters are a nice and cheap option for places where tap water isn’t drinkable. it’s cheaper than any kind of bottled water and they even have the capacity to remove some of the microplastics!
Seeing the report about my local water having too much of 4 things it shouldn’t, I’m OK with bottled till I can figure out how to get my mom onboard with a filter.
it depends very much on where you live. here in austria, we’re close to the mountains and that means it rains a lot, and so there’s tons of fresh water from the mountains, that’s why water quality is good overall.
I imagine if you live somewhere where there’s no mountains, you could only really use what is essentially river water, and i guess that’s dirty as fuck. Here in Vienna we have a big river flowing through the city too, and each time i look at it and imagine drinking its water, i get sick from imagining it. It’s really too dirty to drink. However, if you ever go hiking in the mountains, and walk by a small river on the mountains, you will notice how clean the water seems to be. Many people even say it’s clean enough to drink as it is, you don’t even need to filter it or sth.
The reason for this is that the water is fresh (it didn’t flow a long distance since raining down) and bacteria simply didn’t have time yet to infect it. Also, the fact that the water flows downhill means that it has a much higher flow velocity, and that disrupts bacteria growth because bacteria need calm and quiet to develop (much like autists xD).
Amount of rainfall isn’t that relevant here. The largest factor is how well your town maintains their water distribution system. It’s very expensive and requires proactive maintenance and repairs. Often, there are pipes in the ground with fractures that allow untreated groundwater to infiltrate, introducing bacteria to the system.
Thinking “that mountain stream looks pristine” is a trap that a lot of people fall into. Natural springs, almost without fail, contain E. coli. I mean obviously you’re not going to drink straight out of the river either. You drink groundwater from an aquifer that isn’t influenced directly by surface runoff, or you have a surface intake that’s treated before you can drink it.
It’s also significantly more expensive than buying a filter.
These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.
Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.
Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.
In basically the entire first world: yes, drinkable tap water is the norm. Even living in the middle of nowhere USA, you have well water and it is perfectly drinkable. (That is to say, rural American homes have their own well, water pump, and filtration system)
Water towers are common and completely solve this issue. Even during power outages, gravity still works and water towers provide pressurized, drinkable water to everyone in the area.
You should look into getting a well installed. This is something you and your immediate neighbors could all benefit from and could go in together on if you can’t afford it yourself.
If you don’t mind me asking, what country do you live in? What you are saying is not something that is common in entire continents.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
Man this is spot on for the rural Philippines too, right down to the well details And the pathetic trickle of tap water for. Few hrs a day. At least it rains more in the Philippines I guess.
That was a really interesting read, thank you for the insight.
So cool to hear from lebanon… first world country mates dont really realize how much they take things for granted lol… things like 24/7 electricity and drinking tap water supply isnt rlly a thing in so many regions…
Thank you for the detail. I haven’t seen much on how such things works outside of documentaries and relief donation drives.
Good luck man. <3
Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.
Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.
Unfortunately all I think that would do is create a power vacuum for the next asshole to move up.
That sounds really bad. Simple access to clean water should be available everywhere to everyone.
We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.
My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?
Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.
My heart goes out to you. I was recently in Peru, and the water system was the same. Bottled water was very cheap, about 1 USD/Liter.
The alternative is a complete infrastructure revitalization, which takes a lot of time and money.
Also rofl
amayyah
khthanat
did i transcribe that correctly? I’m currently learning arabic
I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.
إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)
خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét
The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!
i’m still learning 😅️
Yes, in a lot of places, the municipal water is perfectly fine to drink. We penalize people who contaminate the groundwater, and the infrastructure is maintained well enough.
We still have water main breaks that result in a boil-water order, because a break in the pipe means bacteria could enter, but I’ve never had one in any place I’ve lived in the US.
I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
I can’t specifically speak to watering golf courses as I’m not a golfsman (or whatever they’re called) but as far as washing floors and flushing toilets? In the west yes that is precious drinking water.
As you say you’re familiar with how the system works so you understand that it is far cheaper to have one system of infrastructure to deliver water and have all of that water be drinkable rather than have two sets of pipes where one delivers non-potable water for washing and flushing and one for just drinking water.
Is it wasteful to wash and flush with drinking water? Yeah maybe. Is it also wasteful to maintain two sets of infrastructure just to save drinking water? Also yes
As the other person said, yes on the former two, not really on the latter (though there are exceptions).
For an individual, everything is just the one, potable, water supply. Showers, clothes washing, drinking water, lawn watering (though most people don’t water their lawns, it’s expensive and grass grows just fine by itself). It is more complicated and expensive to deal with a secondary water system for homes to have a non-potable water system, so nobody does. One’s water bill is generally the cheapest utility bill.
Fire hydrants hook up to the potable system as well. As that is the only pressurized water that’s really available. Though, some places have taps into lakes and such for when the water system runs dry during large-scale fire-fighting. Think massive forest fires.
Farms, golf courses, data centers, nuclear plants, and other industrial uses generally have a secondary water source that isn’t potable. These are generally lightly treated well, river, or lake water. This is mostly for cost reasons as full water treatment gets pricey when you are using that much water.
Generally, we just plain don’t have water contamination like that. We have enough enforcement of groundwater protection, enough people that care to avoid contamination in the first place, and enough supply from groundwater or snowmelt that even if one source has minor contamination, we can switch to another until it’s remediated or within safe levels.
Which is also why we can afford to use potable water for those purposes. There’s enough of it to go around; it’s not precious here.
Well, except in California and the desert parts of the US, where they’re diverting so much of the Colorado river that the further down the river you go, it gets smaller instead of bigger, until sometimes there’s no river at all.
That’s actually a super interesting topic! In areas with aging infrastructure in first world countries, they intentionally up the mineral content of the water so it forms a second wall so to speak on top of the pipes, keeping it much more sanitary. (Paraphrased). Primarily for lead. Generally though, the constant flow of water running keeps things much cleaner than you might think.
My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.
Quite simply, you need to realise that much of modern sanitization is overkill and meant to prevent 1 in a millions.
The minerals don’t damage kidney I believe
Clay filters are a nice and cheap option for places where tap water isn’t drinkable. it’s cheaper than any kind of bottled water and they even have the capacity to remove some of the microplastics!
Seeing the report about my local water having too much of 4 things it shouldn’t, I’m OK with bottled till I can figure out how to get my mom onboard with a filter.
it depends very much on where you live. here in austria, we’re close to the mountains and that means it rains a lot, and so there’s tons of fresh water from the mountains, that’s why water quality is good overall.
I imagine if you live somewhere where there’s no mountains, you could only really use what is essentially river water, and i guess that’s dirty as fuck. Here in Vienna we have a big river flowing through the city too, and each time i look at it and imagine drinking its water, i get sick from imagining it. It’s really too dirty to drink. However, if you ever go hiking in the mountains, and walk by a small river on the mountains, you will notice how clean the water seems to be. Many people even say it’s clean enough to drink as it is, you don’t even need to filter it or sth.
The reason for this is that the water is fresh (it didn’t flow a long distance since raining down) and bacteria simply didn’t have time yet to infect it. Also, the fact that the water flows downhill means that it has a much higher flow velocity, and that disrupts bacteria growth because bacteria need calm and quiet to develop (much like autists xD).
Amount of rainfall isn’t that relevant here. The largest factor is how well your town maintains their water distribution system. It’s very expensive and requires proactive maintenance and repairs. Often, there are pipes in the ground with fractures that allow untreated groundwater to infiltrate, introducing bacteria to the system.
Thinking “that mountain stream looks pristine” is a trap that a lot of people fall into. Natural springs, almost without fail, contain E. coli. I mean obviously you’re not going to drink straight out of the river either. You drink groundwater from an aquifer that isn’t influenced directly by surface runoff, or you have a surface intake that’s treated before you can drink it.
That’s why I have a reverse osmosis system and use it to refill my plastic arrowhead bottles!
Best of both worlds!
Although my filter is made of plastic and the water travels through plastic pipes. I’m wondering how much of that becomes microplastics.
I mean I’m not going to stop, because I’m fucking full of them anyway, but still…
Or in Germany: more expensive than just drinking it as it is.
I did. But the filter is plastic and so is the pitcher!
I wish the filters and most housings weren’t made of plastic.