Besides for reverse osmosis, what are you using to improve water quality?
Start with pH control to be slightly acidic (in the summertime, when all the algae is having fun copulating and making the raw water extremely basic, this means dumping lots and lots of sulfuric acid). Add in a nice charged coagulant, PACL in this case (and a nice uncharged polymer could be helpful for greasy bits). Mix vigorously, then less vigorously, and then let sit for a while to let the mud settle out of the water.
After settling, bubble 7% ozone through the water. Then send the water through a prepared filter containing sand, gravel, and charcoal with a healthy biofilm on it (I don't remember the exact order, sorry). Be sure to clean the filters every day. Now dump in a load of hydroxide to make the pH slightly basic (also is less hell on your pipes, especially if there's any lead pipes in the system). Add fluoride for health, and dump in all the chlorine (nowadays as bleach; a chlorine gas pipe leak is no fun for anybody). Add some ammonium to get chloramines to help disinfect the water for longer, and some phosphate for pipe corrosion control.
That's basically the same process that's going to get used for any large (think >100 million gallons/day, enough to supply ~300k suburban households), although ozone treatment is relatively rare. UV and reverse osmosis tend to be too expensive to really scale to the large treatment plants, and slow sand filters (not to be confused with the rapid sand filters that are used in most places) requires craptons of space to push enough water to handle a large municipality.
An analysis done by Harvard found it to lower IQs in children:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10579664/3491930...
The data is from China but the levels at which effects were found can be found in some regions of the US.
Water fluoridation started because it was a cheap and easy way to get rid of industrial chemicals:
https://origins.osu.edu/article/toxic-treatment-fluorides-tr...
Looking at that statistic, the levels of the high group are generally ranging from 2-4 mg/L. The target level of water fluoridation is usually about 0.7-1 mg/L, which is about the level of the reference groups in that statistic.
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison, and this is already extremely well-known for fluorine, and accounted for in the water treatment process and regulations.
I bet everyone down-voting my comment is doing it out of reflex and has never read anything about this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_in_the_Unit...
Actually, the Wikipedia article says the opposite (the citation it gives is a dead link, of course)--it suggests to parents that they should be careful with having children use fluoride toothpaste or water with > 2mg/L of water.
> There are plenty of places with more than 2mg/L in the US and Kentucky has places over 4mg/L [2].
If you read that study carefully as well, that's talking about the natural fluoride concentration of well water, not fluoridation within water treatment plants. (Another reason to generally prefer municipal treatment plants as a source for water: they are more likely to follow more stringent guidelines for water contaminants than individual wells).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547570/?report.... (Public Health Rep. 2015 Jul-Aug)
Which goes on to say: For many years, nearly all of these fluoridated systems used fluoride concentrations ranging from 0.8 to 1.2 mg/L; fewer than 1% of these systems used a fluoride concentration at 0.7 mg/L (Unpublished data, Water Fluoridation Reporting System, CDC, 2010). When water systems that add fluoride implement the new PHS recommendation (0.7 mg/L), the fluoride concentration in these systems will be reduced by 0.1–0.5 mg/L, and fluoride intake from water will decline among most people served by these systems.
You amused me with the image of someone thinking "the more fluorine, the better."
Of course this ignores the fact that it is impossible to adjust the dosage for everyone since everyone has a different level of consumption of the water source that we have "spiked". We are essentially medicating people without telling them and it is quite arbitrary. Not to even mention, we are exposing people who boil their water before they drink to higher concentrations etc.
Science isn't settled on this. There is no consensus. What we are doing is blatantly wrong.
How did we collectively decide with such absolute certainty that the positive impact of adding it to prevent tooth decay outweighs the risks and damages? We didn't.
Also it's not like there is no alternative. Use toothpaste with Hydroxyapatite. It works.
Why not distribute this incredible miracle/poison in tablet form for free to these poor families you think this is aiming to protect or provide free dental care if you think dental care is of utmost importance?
We clearly think kidneys (dialysis) are special because a past president had a relative that suffered from a kidney condition.
None of this is being done out of good intentions. Most involved are either misinformed because they are taught science is settled and it is safe and great, or simply uninformed.
Keep it coming - I used to work in a water treatment plant so I love water chemistry questions. If you think reboiling it in Teflon a bunch of times isn’t a great idea I agree but I’ll note all those people who go out in the wilderness with nonstick pots and a bunch of Dasani water seem to do fine.
That's fascinating, because this is an article trying to figure out what to do with such chemicals. If treating water with fluoride is a cheap way to help, I suppose we should continue.
It also makes you think how vulnerable a majority of the world is to people messing with their drinking water.
If you use fluoridated toothpaste, the fluoride in your tap water is pointless at best.
https://www.ada.org/en/member-center/oral-health-topics/fluo...
It costs about $1200 a year to have the tanks swapped out, but don't have a monthly water bill since it's a well. Public water companies claim to do the same type of filtering, but who knows what they're actually doing. It's a good feeling knowing for sure my water is clean.
Need to treat it with minerals though, as the pure water will be acidic and strip your teeth of them otherwise.
It is pretty overkill, but if you want pure water...
Your standard Brita filter doesn't even come close to filtering these chemicals.
For example, Samsung RWP70010TWW is a refrigerator filter approved[2] for filtering PCBs, PFOS, and PFAS, as well as a whole host of other things. You don't need to spend ten thousand dollars installing a reverse osmosis system to get clean water.
1: https://www.nsf.org/knowledge-library/perfluorooctanoic-acid... 2: https://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/Listings.asp?ProductFunc...
Not really.
https://www.panna.org/resources/atrazine#2
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/17/rainwate...
https://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-proposes-pfas-standards-ful...
Are you referring to the resources used to create the equipment then discard it when it's done? Or to the wasted water? A permeate pump increases efficiency quite a bit.
Just this morning I went to the neighbourhood Reverse osmosis machine and paid a few cents to fill up my drinking water bottles.
I think it's a great system.