Drinking Water Sources in England Polluted With Forever Chemicals (theguardian.com) 38
Raw drinking water sources across England are polluted with toxic forever chemicals, new analysis has revealed, prompting the water sector to demand that ministers ban the substances and polluters pay for the astronomical cleanup costs. The Guardian: The areas covered by Affinity Water and Anglian Water were found to be particularly badly affected, and experts have said they fear "we are drastically underestimating the size of the problem." There are more than 10,000 PFAS in use, known as forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment.
[...] In an unprecedented move, the industry body Water UK has said it "wants to see PFAS banned and the development of a national plan to remove it from the environment which should be paid for by manufacturers." It described PFAS pollution as a "huge global challenge" and said: "The UK's tap water is rated as the safest in the world, and companies are already taking action to reduce PFAS levels further." In an attempt to tackle the problem, the EU is considering a proposal to regulate all 10,000 or so PFAS together, but the PFAS industry is lobbying against it and the UK has no plans to follow suit.
[...] In an unprecedented move, the industry body Water UK has said it "wants to see PFAS banned and the development of a national plan to remove it from the environment which should be paid for by manufacturers." It described PFAS pollution as a "huge global challenge" and said: "The UK's tap water is rated as the safest in the world, and companies are already taking action to reduce PFAS levels further." In an attempt to tackle the problem, the EU is considering a proposal to regulate all 10,000 or so PFAS together, but the PFAS industry is lobbying against it and the UK has no plans to follow suit.
We need to ban this shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Just stop it's production. Ban it. We lived without them before. We can do so again.
Re: (Score:2)
But what will we coat our fast-food wrappers with? We can't have the grease seeping out all over our Uber Eats driver's seats! Think of the cleaning bill!
Re: (Score:3)
Well yes, we need to remove it from profuction, but by their very nature these forever chemicas will never break down. They are there and will always be there from now on.
Perhaps they can be filtered out.
Greenpeace was a letter off (Score:2)
Greenpeace's hyperbole about chlorine is almost true about fluoride chemistry. F-gasses, persistent highly bioactive medicines, PFAS. Fluoride is most often used exactly because they allow you to create forever chemicals. The stability is a double edged word.
Normal (Score:1)
Non-drinking water is polluted with human shit, over 1000 times per day, 400,000 times per year.
Meanwhile, filter your drinking water (Score:2)
I have been using an RO filter with several other stages, including carbon filter, for 15 years. This combo will get rid of PFOA and PFAS. The filters are not free, though. And RO wastes water.
Re: (Score:2)
I have been using an RO filter with several other stages, including carbon filter, for 15 years. This combo will get rid of PFOA and PFAS. The filters are not free, though. And RO wastes water.
Why would you filter with a Ring Oscillator? How does that even work?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
This combo will get rid of PFOA and PFAS.
The sounds like commercial speak. PFOA is one member of the large PFAS familly. It is like saying you eat orange and fruits.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not selling anything.
Re: (Score:2)
No. Unless these filters remove the forever chemicals you should avoid filtering.
I've not seen any study showing that water filters actually work, nor add stuff you don’t want to be there.
The water should be filtered at source as usual, forever chemicals are just the latest things to be filtered out at the reservoir.
Re: (Score:3)
RO filters do remove PFAS, which is why I mentioned them.
It took just a single search of scholar.google.com search to find one. This was the first link :
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004
Quote :
"All under-sink dual-stage and reverse osmosis filters tested showed near complete removal for all PFASs evaluated."
The reason this shouldn't be done at the reservoir is that RO is a very wasteful process - it wastes about 80% of the water. That is not viable with droughts in much of the world
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not talking about an advanced and expensive water filtration system that you can install in your home.
No UK resident would do that, too costly and the space under the sink is already a premium.
Perhaps those with bigger kitchens could, especially if they are installing a new kitchen.
The filters that everyone tends to use when and if they want one are the Brita activate carbon filters. They were popular for a while, like soda stream was, but as people realised they do "god knows what" to the water for th
Re: (Score:2)
I already gave you one major reason why RO can't be done at the treatment plan. Turns out there are many others. Feel free to research them.
You have two options - not to filter PFAS, or filter PFAS at point of use. If there is no space under the sink, some RO units work on countertops.
Re: (Score:2)
> The reason this shouldn't be done at the reservoir is that RO is a very wasteful process - it wastes about 80% of the water
Sorry didnt see that at first.
What do you mean wasteful? What does it do, obliterate the water? Does it make it toxic?
If not, it it is just an efficiency thing, well, you just put it back in the reservoir.
> That is not viable with droughts in much of the world nowadays
We are talking about one island nation.
> Thus, you only want to apply RO to drinking or cooking water.
Again
British water is shit for profit (Score:2)
Re:British water is shit for profit (Score:5, Informative)
British water companies are (rightly) in the spotlight right now for years of mismanagement, allowed by a regulator with it's eyes off the ball and a market devised by idiots who couldn't commerce their way out of a subsidised parliamentary bar.
British water companies *could* filter all this stuff out, they *could* stop dumping raw sewage into rivers and the sea, they *could* provide far better service for less money, they *could* have less than 30% of their water leak all over the place rather than get to customers. They do none of these things because they're too busy skimming money off the company in the form of dividends. They used up all the money, so they borrowed more and more, and now they're in debt up to the eyeballs and would go bust if the government wouldn't help them out.
One water company even "did an Enron". They're owned by another company, who placed an order for a million widgets for (I forget the number, so say) £1bn. The widgets were never intended to be delivered, but the water company used that order as justification for a loan from someone else of (say) £2bn. They spent all that money without doing anything to improve anything for the consumer and now can't pay it back without putting up prices to that exact same consumer. All predicated on a fake order that was never fulfilled from their parent company. You couldn't make it up...
Better Advertizing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The culprit? DC seized the word "organic", threatened organic farmers who wouldn't pay them then declared that using municipal sewage waste is organic (keyword: "humanure")and the Dallas waste was full of PFAS.
*Citation needed.
Re: (Score:1)
That's just mean. You know he can't provide one. You're going to spoil his silly outrage fantasy.
Re:"Organic" (Score:5, Informative)
Organic doesn't allow sewage sludge and is federally defined.
Your story has been through a lot of games of telephone.
How much dangerous polluted water would you like? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...the industry body Water UK... said: “The UK’s tap water is rated as the safest in the world..."
Those weasel words fail the taste test. "[I]s rated" by whom? The industry body Water UK, no doubt - or someone it paid to have such an opinion. And how would anyone know how safe water is in other countries?
"Water is then treated or blended with clean water to ensure it does not reach taps at this level".
If they have "clean water", why not supply only that? (Obviously because it would cost them more). How much "clean" water must be mixed with a gallon of polluted water to make the whole amount clean? Obviously a whole lot more - so, again, why not supply the clean water only?
"If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage".
- Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy
Re: (Score:1)
> How much "clean" water must be mixed with a gallon of polluted water to make the whole amount clean?
Sounds positively homoeopathic.
Re: (Score:2)
No one is asking "how much untreated filth can we mix in to our clean water." That's a straw man.
It's more like, "the average levels of a specific test are above a specific threshold, so we have to add additional treatment steps." The clean water they are referring to is water that they have literally CLEANED using expensive treatment processes, and mixed back in to get those levels down.
There's always going to be a certain amount of shit in there. What you're drinking is whatever's been deemed "good enough
Re: How much dangerous polluted water would you li (Score:2)
Is Yale good enough?
Equal first in this table:
https://epi.yale.edu/measure/2... [yale.edu]
Fifth in this this report (and a long way ahead of the US, in 35th):
https://epi.yale.edu/downloads... [yale.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Is Yale good enough?
Whether Yale is a good enough source depends entirely on the topic and the people who created the report. From a leading US university, one might expect some bias towards Western nations and institutions - such as typically characterises Wikipedia, for instance.
Passages like this do not inspire great confidence:
" An adequate water source must be easily accessible and unlikely to be contaminated, particularly by fecal matter".
Re: (Score:2)
It's purely about money. Same goes for leaks - they won't fix something costing them £50 in lost water a month, because it's not worth digging up the road to get to it.
Legal limits for pollutants have become corporate targets. And if it's cheaper to just hope nobody finds out but pay the fine if they do... That's what happens.
Re: (Score:3)
Offwat regulate the water in the UK: https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/ [ofwat.gov.uk]
And they are indepedant, thats the point. They are the ones who punish the water companies. How effective they are at noticing and following up is the same agument as allways.
Re: (Score:1)
There is no proof that home water filteres work, nor if they add anything else to the water.
Re: (Score:2)
You think UK homes will set up a destilling station in the kitchen?
Considering most people can happily boil a kettle to make a cup of tea, but will baluk at the sheer cost of boiling all the water.
Only the rich would destill.
And who will pay for this? (Score:2)
Any regulation must be carefully crafted to prevent the cleanup costs from being passed on to the customers. It should be punitive and come out of profits.
If for-profit companies are fined, they'll find a away to pass the cost along to the ratepayers.
The only way that management will learn not to do this in the future is if they take a haircut on profits.
Re: And who will pay for this? (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s messy: the pension pots of some of these rate payers are invested in these companies. Its a no win situation for them.
And? (Score:2)
Still cleaner than the crud that comes out of most US taps.
Learning about the undrinkability of most US water, piped to actual homes in the US actually shocked me.