How Clean Is Your Tap Water?

We have an uncontrolled substance problem in this country: Thousands of chemicals are allowed into the marketplace with almost no regulation. What chemical regulation we have is arbitrarily divided between the EPA and the FDA and covered under a smattering of different laws.

The EPA's move in October to tighten one such law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, was great news. But perhaps our most intimate exposure to chemicals comes from the tap.

The Safe Water Drinking Act covers less than 100 chemicals, when there are more than 60,000 in use in the United States.

Despite emerging evidence of the dangers of many of those chemicals, not one chemical has been added to the SWDA since 2000.

The New York Times conducted an analysis of almost 20 million drinking-water tests from 45 states, and found that in the last five years, 62 million Americans "have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease." Sometimes they were exposed for years.

(Ed. note: 20 million tests! That's why journalism costs money, and why it's so necessary. The Times' investigative series on drinking water deserves to be read in its entirety.)

So how bad is your water? The Environmental Working Group has released nationwide rankings. (My city, San Francisco, "had insufficient data available and could not be included in the rankings," which is creepy.)

Depending on which contaminants are in your water -- also included in the EWG data -- you can choose the most appropriate filtration system.

Which is great, but what we really need is more proactive testing and regulation of those 60,000-plus chemicals.

Photo: Darkpatator