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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

I think it's well past time to make reverse-osmosis filters standard equipment for every residential kitchen sink. Water pollution is bad and we should still try to prevent it, but, given the actual rates of water pollution observed, the cost-benefit is completely overwhelming.

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Which also takes out minerals and fluoride which you do want. It also is a big expense, and in many parts of the world, the municipal water is tasked with doing this kind of quality assurance for you.

Minerals in water are unnecessary. Fluoride is better obtained by brushing ones teeth.

There was an even near me a couple years ago:

https://kutv.com/news/local/sandy-estimates-600-homes-affect...

And a follow up a year later:

https://kutv.com/amp/news/local/exclusive-cause-of-sandys-wa...

This is of course cherry-picked. And having a million smaller deployments is harder than one big centralized one. But the anecdote here is that even in a well-off, large suburb like Sandy, the infrastructure that is meant to “protect” the residents actually poisoned them.

It’s hard to say, IMO, that municipal run water on its own it guaranteed to be safe.

Obviously accidents happen. But I’d bet 100x over on municipalities (at least in areas I’d want to live in) over ordinary people any day. In places like Cambridge MA, NYC and SF the water is checked multiple times a day for a wide variety of contaminants using industrial processes unavailable to consumers. Similarly, they have the techniques, resources, knowledge, and scale to do filtration not feasible for ordinary people. Just looking at the wide variety of masks out there for Covid and their usage, assuming ordinary people would be willing to pay for top RO equipment and maintain it seems like a leap too far (most would just get a Brita and call it a day). It’s also unreasonable — we pay taxes in order to solve societal problems at societal scale using specialized knowledge and standards that few can replicate.

If there are cases where municipal water supplies are contaminated and it’s unknown for a while, then we need to address that by either changing federal laws, changing funding sources, or otherwise fix such issues for all.

I agree and would never advocate termination of any common utility service, especially not water. I was careful to say that depending on those things alone and pretending like everything is honkey-dorey 100% is silly.

It was just one example. But stuff like this does happen. Just the other day another nearby city mailed all its residents that there was a problem discovered LAST SUMMER, but all is fine because it’s fixed… now.

I don’t know what the solution is. But it’s scary when it happens.

Use bottled water certified to be safe for use by babies.

Or something like https://www.eldoradosprings.com/ or https://rmbw.com/ or similar near you.

I really hope trust in municipal water systems isn't so low that we have to advise people to participate in the environmentally destructive industry that peddles bottled water...

Why?

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-crises-water-fli...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-...

Btw... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/17/flint-water-...

Yet there are about 4000 places in the CONUS where the tap water is even more bad than in Flint. Which just happened to have a known speaker, who produced a documentary about it. Thinking about it, the study didn't even account for the crap that fracking can do. So it should be even more.

I don’t have a citation ready for this, but I recall reading that reverse osmosis creates something like 4 to 6 parts waste for every one part of filtered water. If that’s correct, it doesn’t seem sustainable or responsible on scale.

Edit: adding potential reliable source: https://inspectapedia.com/septic/RO_Waste_in_Septic_Systems....

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