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Comment by afiori | Hacker News Reader

In at least a couple of European countries it is well known that unless your city has specific problems tap water is better than bottled water.

The reason being that (except some cases of corruption...) legal limit are much stricter for tap water.

Better in impurities at the very least, the taste is usually quite worse.

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Living in Germany/Berlin and can confirm. Our tap water is excellent and is way cleaner than all bottled water you can buy. Keep in mind, bottled water is also kept around way longer and has the time to „breed“. In tests, the tap water is consistently less contaminated. I recommend everyone to just stick to it.

As an anecdote: you can let your tap water be tested for free if you have a newborn to ensure and confirm that you can use it for baby food without doubt.

Is Berlin (as opposed to other areas of Germany) culturally ok with drinking tap water?

I'd say all of Germany is culturally very much ok with drinking tap water, Berlin not much more or less than other regions. People who drink bottled water here don't usually do it because they think it's "better" than tap water, it's either because of convenience when you're not home or because they like carbonated water (which is very popular in Germany).

Or because the tap water just doesn't really taste that good. The one coming out of my line just tastes too "metalic", I often tried getting over it but I just can't.

Have you tried a water filter?

A lot of the buildings in Berlin have very old pipes and while the water to the building is alright, we (in Berlin) have to rely mainly on glass bottles of water (bismark) as if you don’t run the taps enough there’s a nice colour that comes out...

I've lived in a few places in Berlin over the years, I've never seen anything but nice clear water come out of the tap (whether at my place or friend's flats). Granted, it's hard water (lots of calcium) but other than that it's perfectly fine. Pipes as bad as you're describing definitely exist but I'd say they're the exception, not the rule.

If there's a lot of calcium old pipes will have nice protection layer, no?

Exactly, and the older the pipe, the thicker the layer.

I was in Berlin this summer for 2 months (Neukolln), in 3 different airbnbs and the water was not tasty, and was quite bitter. Very different compared to Swedish or Austrian or even Italian (florence) water.

I’m no expert in Germany but found it very difficult to get tap water at any restaurants there.

> you can let your tap water be tested for free if you have a newborn to ensure and confirm that you can use it for baby food without doubt.

Without doubt? We just found out that they are microplastics in bottled water, how can you be sure there aren't things in tap water that we haven't discovered yet?

There is microshrimp in NYC water. We love it.

Berlin, of course, has a website in English language with all the information regarding tap water:

https://www.bwb.de/en/index.php

Having spent 5 months in Germany recently I can say without a doubt the entire food chain in that nation is something I miss. Tap water tasted great and the food was super high quality.

tasted gross in Berlin this summer, spent 2 months there.

There are still flats with lead pipes in Germany.

UK as well has generally excellent tap water and everywhere I’ve lived it had never tasted any different to bottled water.

That said I’ve never been a fan of bottle water anyway, I’ve always preferred what my Nan used to call ‘council pop’ (tap water).

Living in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, I can confirm that our water is extremely clean and good to drink. Additionally our city was rated one of the best tasting tap waters for all of Ontario, cities literally compete for quality water. Contrast that to Flint michigan across the river from me.

Best tasting or least tasting? (Since water is tasteless...)

> Since water is tasteless...

I think for some people this might seem to be true. That said, for folks who are able to taste such things, clean water from different sources definitely can have tastes that differ based on the minerality of the water.

I used to think this was BS, but I changed my mind after doing a deep dive into wine, in which flavors like minerality of the soil, local flowers, and the like are definitely represented in finer wines.

For an over-the-top water example, check out this video:

https://youtu.be/rg3Mr6e1KMo

In Germany, every supermarket has dozens of different bottled water brands. The vast majority are not fancy and are on the lower end regarding price. You can taste your way through the different mineralisations, from kind of dry tasting over sweet to salty. It's not a surprise the guy introducing Americans to the varieties of water tastes in your link is German.

You should try tasting distilled water and see for yourself if water is tasteless :). The tastelessness makes it pretty hard to drink.

Pure water is tasteless - the one we drink has a bunch of stuff.

Dude not a fair comparison, here in Canada there's probably the best tap water in the world ;)

Iceland was the best i've ever had

Unless you live up North or on a reservation...

And not to forget a number of bottled waters are simply tap water. One of the earliest I remember was taking Northern UK tap water, in a region that doesn't flouridate, letting it sit in tanks long enough to dechlorinate, then bottling it. Too long ago to remember the brand.

Dasani and Aquafina are both from the tap. Probably lots of others, but we never buy bottled water of any source.

Bottled water is also usually just tap water .. at a 1000% markup. You're paying for tap water plus some plastic.

While that is the common story, I am not entirely convinced. It is presumably true that there are more controls for tap water. But those controls still only test a limited number of substances.

One story that goes around a lot is for example the claim that tap water contains a lot of hormones from all the contraceptive pills women take and then flush out of their body into the water system. That seems to not be controlled for. Not sure how serious the issue really is.

More controls also doesn't change the quality of water. It only detects bad water of some variants. If you had an excellent "mineral water" and an OK tap water, more controls wouldn't make the tap water any better.

Not saying you shouldn't drink the tap water. I drink it most of the time.

If that's the case, the same would be true for most bottled water. The majority of mainstream brands are made from water from the same distribution system, just filtered some more and with added minerals.

Is there a list? I know that in the US all tap water is (or should be) safe to drink. But anytime I travel, even to developed countries, I only use bottled water since I consider the water to be suspect unless I know differently.

US tap water is far from safe to drink. Ask Flint, Michigan. (Incredible levels of lead in the water).

Pittsburgh (in 2017) didn't even have enough people to run the necessary water audits.

Milwaukee's city health commissioner resigned in 2018 because they didn't warn about unsafe lead levels in the water.

In 2018, around half of the samples from Newark's water system showed lead levels above the EPA's threshold.

Large parts of Texas' water contain elevated amounts of radium[1]. Brady, TX, has water that's green, brown, orange[2] - it changes - and has 9 times the EPA limit of radium

California has a statewide sanitation problem.[3]

And that's just a starter set.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drinking-water-radium-contamina... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-am... [3] https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/art...

I guess it's just the places in the US I've lived in that have safe tap water.

Yes, just the vast majority of the US (geographically and population wise) has incredibly good tap water, with a long tail of famously bad exceptions to the rule.

63 million people is a really, really long tail.

How does this compare to the EU? It's one thing for tap water to not be perfect, it's quite another for it to be as bad as Flint, MI. What's the true distribution here?

Making people unreasonably afraid of tap water just seems irresponsible.

Making people affraid of tap water is the business model of bottled water. US tap water is well known to be bad compared to the rest of the developed world (thanks to marketing).

Where did you get 63 million?

The third link from GP has a headline which reads “360,000 Californians have unsafe drinking water. Are you one of them?”

That’s approximately 1% of CA’s population. That’s not even a long tail.

The second link.

> As many as 63 million people — nearly a fifth of the United States — from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

So I believe what’s happening here is that they took the total population coverage of any water district that ever had at least two reports of a water quality or monitoring violation in the last decade.

I think ”potentially” is the key word here which makes this claim particularly washy. Are they looking at violations which actually resulted in measurably unsafe water, which were likely to cause or result in unsafe water, or merely violations which could possibly resulted in unsafe water, or perhaps monitoring lapses which would have failed to detect potentially unsafe water, but without any evidence that water was actually ever unsafe?

It’s a newsroom investigative report, not a scientific study. Take this with a huge grain of salt.

Geographically the vast majority of the US doesn't have tap water.

There are several lists online, but essentially tap water is safe (preferable, even) across the whole of Europe and Scandinavia.

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