Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
An example: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Safe-Home-Do-it-Yourself-Lead-in...
I'd expect them to work reasonably well, at least for lead. The chemistry is pretty simple. Whether they can detect low concentrations is another matter. You could boil a pot of water until most of it is gone and test that. You'll have a much higher concentration of any contaminants.
If you are on well water, call your county department of health, there might be a fee, but it should be lower than a private lab.
Many things have no safe value but a low level is less likely to play a major role in a life than another risk.. Cars, guns, opioids, suicide, cancer, maybe the last two have a minor lead influence, mostly outweighed by alcohol.
The problem with heavy metals is that they're cumulative, but it's also impossible to avoid them completely, so minimization is the strategy.
-20db is 1/100th which is a dramatic improvement, at least for that threat source.
This means is damages your neurons in any amount.
Contrast to say, copper, which doesn't start causing damage until levels exceed a certain tolerable threshold.
While lead is toxic at any amount, low amounts of lead cause low amounts of damage. It doesn't change the fact that the ideal exposure is 0 and over 99% of people have about 5 to 10 times the bond lead levels found in remains of our ancestors, and that even relatively low lead exposure levels from breathing lead in the air from just air pollution are linked to dramatically reduced IQ.
99% of people live better lives than all of our ancestors, in every dimension.
if you're telling me it's because of lead, then lead is a good thing.
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1825584397363589312
Basically the IQ gap between the lead exposed and non exposed has stayed the same even though the amount of lead in the bloodstream has dropped by orders of magnitude. So either the first part of lead exposure is 100x more damaging then the 100th part of lead exposure (which animal models do not bear out) or a lot of the lead exposure IQ research is confounded.
Effects of calcium supplementation on blood lead levels and short term memory of chronically exposed children https://oamjms.eu/index.php/mjms/article/view/3285
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/basic-in...
It's not trying to be alarmist, it's just different from things like, say, table salt, where small amounts over time are fine but 1 pound will kill.
I've done no research, but I wonder what the risk tradeoff is between a tiny amount of lead in contact with my drinking water (assuming copper pipes joined together with lead-based solder, not lead-free solder) versus the new plastic pipes that are becoming standard. I'm sure PEX is designed so that it doesn't leach plastic nastiness into the water, but I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that after a few decades it starts breaking down anyway and suddenly we have a whole new toxin in our drinking water and we need to replace half of the pipes in America again.
PEX is easy to work with and cheap up front. The cost and risk are shifted onto the future owners.
I mean yes, you chopped down your forests millennia ago ;).
Either way, if you have rodents inside… that’s its own issue.
Of course rodent issues are related to PEX: now if a rodent ever does get in, the damage is multiplied when they eat your delicious PEX water pipes and you get a flood in addition to all the other horrors. Not so with metal piping.
It would be nice if all homes on earth could be completely 100% rodent proof forever. And it would be nice if attackers never breached computer systems. But some of us have to live in a world where such things happen.
If you want to talk about blast radius: PEX is substantially more resistant to freeze bursting. What about houses that are poorly insulated, so they are prone to pipe freezes? Copper pipes would be ill advised in that situation. I assume the same houses that are prone to rodent infestations are also poorly insulated. Which is more likely to happen I suppose depends on your climate.
For good measure, I might also remind her that notwithstanding the flooding, the rats were a "major issue". Just in case she was confused about that!
The longer I have a home, the more I realize every thing has its gotcha's.
IIR, larger chemistry laboratories often use glass & quartz pipes to distribute distilled water. Though the direct costs of such a system are relatively high.
It sounds like a big facepalm, and it kind of is, but it's not a crazy idea to filter your water at the taps: you probably only have 2-6 of them anyway. I'm a fan of the whole-home water filter, but yeah then you've gotta be confident about your pipes.
I'd choose micro plastics vs an equivalent mass dose of lead.
If it was 1000x the amount of micro plastics vs lead it's maybe less obvious which is the less bad poison. I'd have to do some research at that point.
I think framing it this way it's obvious that lead is worse than micro plastics. But when you go from lead soldered copper pipes to PEX I don't know what the doses you get from each are.
Maybe if you said a billion times.
The reason we know there isn't a safe dose of lead is a lot of study.
Every month there's a new study about some crazy micro plastics things where they got found in some new place. We're in the early days of figuring out how bad it is. We don't really know yet.
How much lead is permissible before it’s bad? The answer is, very very very little.
In comparison, you get copper contamination from copper pipes (especially if the water is too acidic), however the body handles a little copper just fine. It doesn’t build up in the body unlike lead.
Then you’re left with plastics: PEX or PVC. As of yet, there’s some potential concerns with microplastics in general… but that is from all the tiny plastic particles found everywhere, not solid pieces of pipe. And there hasn’t really be any evidence that it causes any specific known issue. If it was some giant problem (like lead in drinking water!) then the magnitude of effect would be much more obvious.
Common wisdom is "there is no safe level of lead".
Both are made from Polyethylene, which is the exact same stuff oil (including food), gas, wax, natural gas, etc is made off. i.e. you body handles that all the time.
- polyethylene oil?
- gas?
- natural gas?
- wax (I'm assuming candle wax)?
I understand you don't mean "drink" when you say our body "handles" it, but you do realize we don't make food from PET, nor do we usually "handle" gas and natural gas in any form of direct contact?*
* with the fun exception of a brief craze in my high school years where people would mix hard alcohol with gasoline to make cocktails "stronger". That's another story though
It's the same way that, even though you shouldn't drink it, acetone is barely toxic, because your body knows how to process it.
I should remind you that there are other plastics, but polyethylene is not one of the toxic ones.
(Gas, as in gasoline, has benzene which is a different category. Note also that many plastics have plasticizers which are also a different category, although polyethylene rarely has any, it's possible that it could.)
If that was such an obvious problem, they wouldn't have put the lead pipes in the first place...
I am not advocating for lead or copper soldered water pipes, but I am conservatively skeptical about PVC being totally safe for the same timeline existing lead pipes have been in use. In July the EPA proposed raising the priority rating of vinyl chloride on its toxic substances list. It doesn't seem implausible to me that in 50 years we'll be taking about PVC pipes the same way were talking about lead pipes today.
I am not claiming that PVC water pipes are dangerous just that I am skeptical there is enough historical data to claim they are totally risk free. I am not a scientist or expert on this subject
1.https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/lead...
Edit: added source
Regarding PVC: It already is not used in almost any new construction for water supply lines, at least in the US. It's used for drains, but the leeching concern isn't really an issue for drain pipes. No water pressure, and no continuous immersion typically. Issues about BPA/vinyl compounds are
As per PEX, I can't say for certain that it's 100% risk free, but overall there is increased scrutiny on drinking water and contaminates and PEX right now seems to be the best choice.
I wouldn't use PEX for fresh water pipes.
I’ve seen ABS and PVC (and, of course, cast iron) for DWV, but don’t think I’ve ever heard of Pex for that.
When really the last mile is the most variable aspect. All of it needs to be clean the whole way.
The way people talk about local water is absurd.
As an adult, I learned that lead was still used in water pipes. Even the more recent "lead-free" pipes can still have a little bit of lead in them ("no more than 0.25% lead in the wetted surfaces").
We learned so much from the Romans, and then burned leaded gasoline anyway!
Incidentally they did the same to grape syrup.
That's a longgg fall.
Burying electrical cables isn't anywhere near as clear-cut of a benefit, AFAIK. Better in some ways, worse in others, ~always more expensive.
In general, yes, for all the comparisons of good vs bad that I can think of. Long term effects of microplastics vs neurotoxic metals is "we aren't quite sure long term, but not measurable brain damage" vs "guaranteed measurable brain damage short to long term".
If plastic bits are big enough, it's obviously a different equation (acute vs gradual), but that's not the implication I understood.
There was also a study which showed that boiling tab water with microplastics binds those in the line which builds up.
And you pipes shouldn't emit any measurable amount of microplastics. Any emission is a flaw somewhere that you are better fixing. But even with all the flaws, the microplastics are not even remotely as bad as lead.
Next on the line, yeah, eating dirt is safer than concentrated potassium cyanide, and swimming drunk in a water pool is safer than in a lava pool.
Is it possible to bury high voltage transmission lines?
However, underground cables can be also be broken (e.g: by water leaks or backhoes), and in these cases, it can be more expensive and time-consuming to find and fix the break. I believe initial installation is also more costly.
Because water delivery is centralized and power distribution is not, the size of the power grid is approximately 3x that of water infrastructure.
And the percentage of lead pipes makes up a small part of the whole (9.2 million lead lines out of 100 million total, from the EPA report) while the percentage of above ground power lines makes up a very large part of the whole. Replacing those 9.2 million line segments is estimated (heh) to cost $30 billion.
At $1 million per mile, needing to replace 82% of the distribution system and 99.5% of the transmission system would cost:
$1 million x (5.5 million * .82) + $1 million x (500,000 * .995) = $5 trillion dollars.
$5 trillion is $5,000 billion.
$5,000 billion > $30 billion.
By a lot.
Above ground percentages: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7250
Line type mileage: https://ifp.org/how-to-save-americas-transmission-system/
I don't know how much it costs to bury power lines but this article says it costs $1 million per mile for water pipes so I figured that would be a good starting point: https://www.americaninfrastructuremag.com/flowing-forward-ad...
Lead may not be used in EU pipes, but the fittings and solder still contain lead.
https://www.zerowater.eu/zerowater-knowledge-center/lead-in-....
“The authors of the study stated that it could be assumed that other municipalities in Germany – with the exception of Frankfurt am Main and the southern German states – might also be confronted with increased levels of lead in drinking water.”
It’s not surprising to me that the former GDR states that the article mentions as hotspots in the following paragraph are in a different position, they have to catch up in a lot of areas.
(And that’s not going into what’s considered “exceeded” levels in the EU.)
[1] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges-infras...
"That’s one of the more bizarre things in the US to me."
I am pointing out that you shouldn't consider it a bizarre thing in the US, because it a is a problem in Europe as well.
Trying to insult me by explaining that Europe is made up of different countries is obviously not helpful. Hungary and Bavaria are both part of Europe. That is my point. I'm sorry you didn't understand this.
I'd be shocked if the EPA's cost estimates turns out to even be within an order of magnitude off the actual cost. Maybe they're just measuring the cost to utilities for the parts not on private property.
Hard water (high in calcium and magnesium) can form a scale on the inside of copper pipes. In a way this acts as a protective layer, as the water doesn't actually come into contact with the copper.
Lead should be a Schedule I substance controlled by the DEA?
Replacing with new plastic pipes rise concerns about mictoplastics in water.
You should only get a trace amount of sodium (milligrams per cup of water I imagine) just from any tiny bit of salty water that wasn't backwashed out during the rinse cycle, but nothing more. If your water has salty taste that means you probably need a new water softener
Good to know, thank you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_softening#Ion-exchange_r...
It's pretty crazy.
- [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/01/1241470...
Regardless of the history, it’s a big issue that requires a massive effort to solve.
The original people involved had no awareness of the danger. As awareness grew, you could make the case that people in the 80s could have stopped installing these pipes sooner, but by then, most of the system was already in place and the continued installations were based on 150+ years of precedent and policy.
A majority of the decision makers (not necessarily just politicians) responsible for the policies and a majority of the pipes are dead.
The exemption is a matter of pure practicality. There are only so many crews capable of doing this work and so much of the water system that can be disrupted at one time.
But redoing infrastructure is a huge and expensive undertaking, also given that 100+ years ago they weren't as diligent in mapping out things underground and they put sewage, electricity and internet in the same ground since then.
IIRC an in-between solution is lining the pipes with an inner plastic one (they have Ways), but that may not be possible everywhere and reduces the flow capacity.
Anyway there's 2.2 million miles of water piping in the US apparently, that'll take a while.
I have some experience with the local utility companies in my city and it's shocking how often they don't know where their own lines are, even ones that are only a decade or two old. I can only imagine how lacking the knowledge is from 100+ year old infrastructure.
Another issue besides tearing up the whole front yard (our line is 8' deep) is it would likely destroy the ancient ceramic sewer line. An upgrade can get expensive quick
Normally you're supposed to put away 1-2% of the home's value into a repair/maintenance fund. That way you won't get hit too hard for all the random crap that crops up when owning a house.
https://www.kake.com/news/wichita-used-to-use-trees-as-water...
1: America for sure, I would suspect other countries might not be as bad, as they would have generally electrified more recently- just not that many electrical transmission lines in Romania in 1921- and are more likely to have had to rebuild after wartime.
They would determine whether the EPA is acting within the powers granted to it by Congress, which is what only judges are qualified to do.
Previously, under Chevron, the courts would defer to the EPA as the experts to make that determination (with the understanding that congress could always pass more specific legislation if they felt the EPA was overstepping its granted authority)
What the Supreme Court has said is deferring to the agency is going too far, and that if congress wants specific things regulated then it needs to be specific in it's legislation. Prima facie that makes sense, except for two major problems: congress is not productive enough in passing legislation, and congress are not the experts
This means that when questions like this arise, it comes to the courts to be the ones who end up interpreting the statutes and making the determination on what "bad for you" means.
Or rather, judges have been given the power to make technical interpretations of law rather than just looking at the broad meaning of a law and leaving the technical interpretation to the agency.
See the overturning of the Chevron decision.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Section 1417 of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) establishes the definition for “lead free” as a weighted average of 0.25% lead calculated across the wetted surfaces of a pipe, pipe fitting, plumbing fitting, and fixture and 0.2% lead for solder and flux. The Act also provides a methodology for calculating the weighted average of wetted surfaces.
The intended checks having failed, they're allowed to do this. You're old enough to know that "allowed to" does not automatically mean "morally right."
EDIT: Actually, let's bottom-line it: Stop pretending that pointing out any flaws in a democratic government is anti-democratic. That's exactly backwards.
Judges always determined if an agency was acting within its statute.
The question that Chevron settled, was what if the statute was too ambiguous? Congress used to update laws regularly, but those times are over. It can't legislate effectively anymore. A lot of our laws are ancient and they're designed for a bygone era that often predates even the computer, never mind the internet, modern medicine, etc.
Chevron said, judges don't get to make decisions in those cases. Because those would be arbitrary decisions. It's better to have third party experts make those decisions until Congress can catch up. And if Congress has a problem it can overrule them as it always could. Agencies set up processes to make the review open, to gather data and evidence, comments for the public, etc.
Now we have the worst of all worlds. Appointed partisan judges, with no oversight, no accountability, get to make monumental arbitrary decisions about how minutia of our lives work, based on absolutely nothing, with no review, no criteria and no relevant expertise at all. All while essentially having no code of ethics and being subject to lobbying.
This is defeatist, and misses the point. Congress should continue to update laws regularly and the SC decision provides an impetus for them to start doing so. Congress mandating the regulation also has the effect of Congress determining the scope of legislation. With Chevron, there's no reason for them to update laws because they just let, e.g., the EPA make up the scope of the laws themselves. (Why people will claim "overreach".)
The scenario this enabled is a new presidential administration would be elected who would fire the old regulatory leadership and hire their own, effectively allowing the executive branch to re-write the law every 4-8 years. There was a lot of opinion thrown around about how the SC decision is a power grab for the judicial branch and I just don't see it. They took power away from the executive and gave it back to the legislative, where it had been before Congress became useless.
Whether or not one agrees with this approach is worth considering, but man, talk about comments that demonstrate the author has "no idea what Chevron was about".
Ok. Well I have nothing to say to that. Enjoy your pollution, diseases and shortned lifespan!
If you could even attempt it, it would take 100 years.
There are many different types of plastics, and many (most?) do not use plasticizers. You are in negligible danger of exposure to them from polyethylene (HDPE/LDPE/XLPE). The main source of plasticizer exposure is flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) (also rigid PVC isn't nearly so bad); you might also be thinking of polycarbonate, for which the monomers themselves are intrinsically rather nasty, or for polyurethane, which has similar issues but not quite so bad.
Microplastics are a problem everywhere.
But, seriously, if you're going to criticize things, and there are a few valid criticisms of plastic piping... please learn about what you're criticizing so you can make the correct criticisms and not just make unuseful knee-jerk statements.
That data can then be used for tracking, remediation and support.
It would also reveal how much differential education outcomes are correlated to lead levels.