Page 64 - Spring 2019 Journal

Technology as Servant
OPTIONS FOR DRINKING WATER FILTRATION By John Moody
Water filters are both an important and affordable way to deal with our nation’s water woes, especially compared to bottled water.
The importance of clean water (and the lack of it, especially in municipal water supplies) continues to garner national attention. The Flint water system debacle highlights the problem: our nation’s water supplies are compromised— some egregiously, most, seriously.
Flint was the proverbial tip of the iceberg.1 According to Scientific American, the problem of lead contamination that Flint highlighted for the nation was far from an “aberration,” with “nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis”; in over a thousand communities, the rate of elevated blood tests has been shown to be at least four times higher than in Flint.2 “Poisoned places” described by Scientific American include a town on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania (high lead levels in 36 percent of children tested), a “zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poison- ing” and “pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where...the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40-50 percent.”2
Moreover, lead is just one very problematic contaminant. Water supplies also face issues with at least three dozen or so other contami- nants, including other heavy metals, industrial waste chemicals like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) (see my cookware article3) and more. In addition, almost all municipal water utilities disinfect with chlorine4 or chloramines,5 leaving our water full of dangerous chlorine byproducts.
Seventy-five percent of Americans on com- munity water systems consume water to which toxic fluoride chemicals have been added.6 Fluoride’s presence in our drinking water is unnecessary for its stated purpose (prevention of tooth decay),7 but also poses a real danger to our health and the health of our children.8
NO GUESSING
These problems with municipal water sys-
tems have helped propel several commercial responses, including the unsustainable, costly and wasteful bottled water industry; reusable water bottles; and water filtration. Although the bottled water business has thus far outpaced water filtration as a response, it is important to point out that water filters are both an important and affordable way to deal with our nation’s wa- ter woes, especially compared to bottled water. Many water filtration systems bring consumers significantly improved water for under ten cents a gallon. Bottled water, which is often no dif- ferent from nor any better than tap water, does it for ten to fifty times that cost!
Not all water filters are created equal, how- ever. Even more importantly, specific situations sometimes require specific filtration solutions. To put it another way, there is no perfect one- size-fits-all water filtration system for everyone. Water quality and contamination levels vary greatly. The best system is the one that is tailored to the specific challenges and needs at hand.
This is one reason why testing your water is important. As I constantly say during homestead and farm consults, “Until you test, it’s just a guess!”—and guessing generally turns out to be far more expensive than testing. (For more information about water testing, see “Which filter should I choose?” below and check out my 2014 Wise Traditions article on water testing.9)
FILTERS VERSUS PURIFIERS
Many people use the terms “filtration” and
“purification” interchangeably. Technically, the two terms are not interchangeable, but some systems accomplish both functions. A water filter is generally designed to remove a portion of contaminants, some at a high rate, including protozoa and bacteria. A water purifier will re-
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Wise Traditions
SPRING 2019