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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

25% of US municipal drinking water fails Safety standards: https://www.popsci.com/drinking-water-standards

Those standards are also very loose IMO letting a lot of crap though that I don't want to drink on a regular basis. So, it's really more of a mixed bag than you might think.

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> Don't buy plastic disposable water bottles if you live in a developed nation

I´m playing with semantics here. But some parts of USA hardly count as developed states. As a country, the USA is overachieving in a lot of measures, but individual states found themselves at the same level than developing nations.

It´s difficult to apply the same rule to 10,000,000km2 of territory and 325 Million people.

Does that mean the US can get officially recognized as a developing nation and get all the perks? Guaranteed the US would start pushing more initiatives like the Paris Climate Accord if they got the economic benefits, would be great for the climate change movement

Their point was it isn't accurate to apply a single label to the entire USA not that the single label should be changed.

If you live in one of those areas you're far better off with a filtration system than regularly purchasing bottled water which is also not in any way guaranteed to be safe.

It can take a lot to filter water safely. The classic carbon filter under the sink does very little to improve safety, even reverse osmosis can fall short. So, while you can make things safer it's far more difficult than many assume.

Sounds like the best option is to buy bottled water, and then filter out the microplastics.

Most problems with plastics are chemical not physical contamination. (It is a solution of plasticizers and substrates in water.)

I am pretty sure ingesting plastic sand would be nowhere newer bad without these. (Intestine shouldn't take that in.)

These are extra hard to filter out. Even big fermentation tanks and reverse osmosis filters have problems with this.

There is also the danger of microplastic particles acting as endocrine disruptors. This is a rapidly developing field within (eco)toxicology and is of growing concern among environmental scientists.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.6b01441

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974911...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...

Reverse osmosis should do the trick.

I'll add that there is a deeply ingrained myth that New York City tap water is "the best in the world" when in fact it's not even among the 10 cleanest water supplies in the country and contains concerning amounts of dangerous pollutants like chloroform.

All the more reason to push for our governments to properly regulate a safe supply of drinking water (infrastructure level).

Governments that do this in Europe fail horribly and just increase prices by huge multiples, nothing else. Last year a whole division of a capital city (Prague) got pretty seriously sick because of government failure. Today in the morning the water did not run at all. Thanks, government.

I know HN is very leftist, so I expect downvotes. It'd be nice to have a discussion though.

Last time I checked, we had very decent municipal water in France. In many cities it actually tastes better than bottled water. Water sources are quite well protected as well. It's not perfect, but honestly much better than the swimming pool water I drank in the US.

So "Europe" is maybe a broad term here.

I think it's weird that whenever the subject of safe drinking water comes up, people immediately talk about how it tastes. As if that matters. I mean, lead is pretty tasty, too.

Once you sampled enough public water in your month around the world, you tend to associate bad taste with bad quality. Water that doesn't make you sick has a very subtle one, or taste like a swimming pool. But you won't drink the second one so...

Nice TIL: lead acetate for me there.

Agreed about "Europe" being too broad a term. Another commenter mentioned a similar sentiment about making claims about the entire USA.

UK water is safe and decent. Although here in London it's very hard and so tastes like crap.

There are places where it's better or even very good in the Czech Rep. as well. The point is that sometimes, government fails horribly and there is no way out because well, it's the government, its whole job is to enforce its rule. BTW the USA as a whole is comparable to the EU as a whole in terms of corruption and competency.

Governments are very malleable over time. Change is not necessarily cheap, but it's also inherent.

One occurrence l of failure in one city in one European country is not an indication of ongoing issues in all European countries.

Would love to hear about systematic issues in Sweden, Germany, Norway, France, Belgium, Switzerland etc. All have strong government role in regulation and municipal water supplies.

Your comment implying political bias for everyone who disagrees with you is cheap rhetoric. And, the US is so far right on the political spectrum that anyone “leftist” there is likely to the right of the center in the EU.

In Bergen, Norway a few years ago there was a problem with water contamination. Basically city negleted to upgrade the filtering system and after few atipically mild winters and/or population growth near watter sources some microorganisms managed to grow in sufficient quantities to pass through the old very basic filters. People in affected districts were advised to drink bottled water as even boiling watter was not enough to kill all microorganisms.

>"Governments that do this in Europe fail horribly and just increase prices by huge multiples, nothing else." That's a very strong statement to make based on one example. That would like saying that the US has no quality control, look at Flint. As an argument for less government, this just isn't very strong. It would help to show a systematic failure instead of a singular event. But, I could imagine if that were to happen where I live, I would be pretty angry at whoever caused it as well.

That is not a proof that governments cannot regulate water quality. The water quality in the Netherlands is really good, tap water is better than most bottled waters.

All you have shown is that Czech government needs to improve.

Maybe it's your implementation of government, not the concept itself that's at fault. Having lived in Germany for 30 years, I never experienced anything like that nor met anyone who has.

You can't really make expectations based on literally one of the best cases.

Citations? I don't know much about European handling of drinking water.

http://www.radio.cz/en/section/news/two-charged-over-contami... (this is a government-sponsored public radio)

Austria here and I am very satisfied with my "socialist water" experience. Exposing basic requirements for survival to free market forces seems like a recipe for failure.

What about food?

Maybe this is different in Eastern Europe (you know, the old Warsaw pact countries), but in Western Europe tap water is of very reliable quality, and consistently delivered.

I'm comparing the EU as a whole to the USA as a whole because it's pretty much the same in terms of competence and corruption. BTW Czech Republic is the most successful out one of Warsaw Pact countries and is on basically the same level as some of the western ones.

If that's what you want to say, then say that instead of making blanket claims that governments regulating drinking water fail horribly.

Well most of western Europe has cheap perfectly drinkable water. I don't think you can blame social democracy. Blame incompetent and corrupt locals.

The EU as a whole is very comparable to the USA as a whole in terms of competence and corruption. This was my point - somewhere it'd be OK or even very good, but somewhere it's going to be horrible and there is going to be no way out.

I'd be very surprised if the water in Prague was consistently bad. One failure doesn't mean much in the big picture.

Edit: And it certainly isn't comparable to having water that's not safe to drink at all (bad water being the rule, rather than the exception).

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