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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits?

Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?

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Apparently, none of the methods used in normal water purification remove nitrates:

https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-remove-n...

Those are residential systems. At the municipal level it is more often done with bacteria in large tanks.

It's not unlike brewing beer in that you need to adapt your recipe constantly to account for variations in inputs in order to get a consistent product out the other end.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-08/documents/de...

I was about to say, I happen to have aquascaping / aquariums as a hobby and getting the right bacteria in your water and keeping those in balance is a crucial part of keeping nitrates down.

Plants also use nitrates as a nutrient.

People have wells at their homes, their water isn't being purified by someone else. Centralized supplies in the area are going to treat and monitor their water to ensure that it is below the applicable limits.

It's reasonable to treat the aquifer home wells draw from as a public good and prevent contamination of it. Whether Amazon has particular responsibility in this case is a different question than that.

It is but if a party mixes in another stream that normally speaking would not have found its way into the water purification system that system may no longer work. Amazon could of course just use closed loop systems like they are required by law to use elsewhere but chose not to.

Amazon chose not to because it’s almost twice as efficient to use open loop cooling towers vs a closed loop. COP of 4 for an air-cooled chiller but add a cooling tower and your COP goes up to ~7.

Not sure, but we know that it is definitely not AWS’ job to pollute it

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