I don’t remember anything clear-cut. I know that real blind-taste tests often fail - people who claim they only like Cola prefer Pepsi and vice versa. There’s also a strong bias for the expensive/ prestigous brand over the cheap/ store brand, that blind tests often turn on their head.
But that doesn’t mean that everybody who complains about tap water is biased - remember that those biases are ** unconcious** - or activly exaggerating, or purposely lying. It means that for a certain segment of people, other things subconsciously influence taste. That doesn’t invalidate their personal observation.
[qutoe]Plastic bottles, most of which are thrown away. Even recycling them isn’t terribly efficient (and I’m pretty sure it creates toxic by-products).
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I keep forgetting how wasteful Americans are with everything. Until about a decade ago, all mineral water in Germany was sold in 0,7 l glass bottles (called pearl bottles because of the pattern of raised pearls on the surface). It’s only in the last decade that plastic bottles for mineral water became more and more popular, both because of weight and breakability.
But of course those bottles will be either multiple-way or one-way deposit.
Actually, the attitude shown above - simply throwing plastics away instead of recycling; no deposit system or other laws by the govt. - show that the attitude of helping the companies in preference of people, consumers and nature is why tap water is suspected of being of bad quality in the first place. Rigorous laws and lots of controls to make sure that consumers get clear, good tap water (and that rivers are clean) would be a “burden” and “expense” to companies. Much easier to have people buy a water filter (if they can afford it).
Likewise, much easier to let companies produce plastic bottles that litter the landscape, instead of mandating a deposit system that helps the enviroment.
constanze, a lot of American tap water is quite clean, especially if you’re connected to the water system of a large city. It tends to be more problematic in terms of taste, if not safety, when people are on well water. As for the river thing, keep in mind that the best-known Cuyahoga River fire was in 1969, four decades ago, and was actually the impetus for a lot of water quality legislation that is currently active. It’s not like we currently have polluted rivers spontaneously combusting.
Your post wasn’t there while I was typing my reply.
So by your own quote, half of the people preferred the bottled water, and only 8% couldn’t distinguish the difference. How does that prove the earlier claim that “many people” are exaggerating or lying?
I don’t know how reliable the Telegraph as newspaper is. But after the scandal with the privatisation of the British water companies under Thatcher, and the resultant decline of the pipes (while simulatonously raising the prices, gouging profits without investing anything to maintain the infrastructure; then, when the pipes were crumbling left and right, the private owners made out like bandits and gave the ruined companies, in worse shape than before, back to the govt.) - I would not trust the London water to be clean , regardless of taste.
So to repeat the questions from #76, does the legislation vary by city? One city has good water, but the villages out in the country don’t? Are the standards only for bacteria, or also for other pollutants, like pesticides, heavy metals like lead, etc.?
How is well water regulated?
I know from the Health Baths and some mineral water that not everything that tastes bleargh is bad for you (and vice versa - lead or pesticides in the water can often not be tasted) - lots of people go especially to the Baths to drink salty water (bowels, stomach) or sulfur or similar.
But the private homeowner who digs a well, does he have to get it tested?
The water preference turned out to be about half and half in that experiment, and in the other two tests I quoted, tap water ranked higher than all or some bottled. With such a small sample size, I’m sure that the distribution could be the same as flipping a coin–if bottled water were really better, you’d see a much stronger preference for it.
You know, it helps when you actually read the whole thread instead of just jumping in. On the first page, the very first thing I said was:
I cannot comment on whether or not **Lightray **is near a river that has caught fire from chronic pollution recently, seeing as he neither specified a river nor when it was on fire. All I was responding to was what seemed to me to be your mistaken impression that most or all of the drinking water in the U.S. is highly contaminated.
It’s a matter of which they **think **they prefer. Blind taste tests have been known to trip people up plenty of times… as evidenced by the quick links I provided above.
Well, my address just changed again, which means back to buying bottled water. It also means my carbonating equipment is still in Michigan, and I have to buy expensive agua mineral instead of making it virtually free from the excellent Detroit water system. Luckily the non-carbonated water is available dirt-cheap in 19 L carboys, but it’s still expensive (about $2.10 per 19 L) compared to Detroit water.
I do use the tap water to brush my teeth with and shower, and it doesn’t actually taste bad here. It also makes perfectly acceptable drip coffee.
I think people want just plain water. Not chlorine, not flouride, no smell. That’s why bottled water is desirable in many cases. Right now my well water smells and tastes fine to me, but at my previous house I didn’t have too much confidence in the public water supply.
I highly doubt that. Aside from the multiple reports from Enviromental and consumer protection organisations about the bad quality, the US mostly lacks the three necessary requirements for good, clean water.
My own city, Munich, has tap water with one of the highest quality in all of Germany, under the very strict laws for tap water in Germany. (Our water company advertises the tap water as so good it could be sold in bottles elsewhere - while this is with a wink, the quality is high), therefore I know the basic about good water.
The three pillars of good water are:
Geographic conditions: lots of rainfalls, usually because of mountains, with lots of pebbles (usually left over from the ice age) to filter the water through. Good water management then adds forest on top to aid in the filtering.
Most of the US does not have the necessary geogrpahy with lots of rain fall and filtering ground, except for the upper East Coast (Boston and Appalachians) and upper West Coast (Seattle/ Washington).
A dedicated, long-planning city council who puts a high priority on good water. In Munich, this started a good 150 years ago with Max von Pettenkofer, a doctor of hygiene, who convinced the city in council in the 1850s to build a good sewage and drinking water system to prevent diseases like Cholera. Some of the brickware tunnels that transport the Mangfall water to Munich are still in good order after 100 years.
The city council, with the mayor Ude at the top, strongly opposes all attempts by the EU to privatise the public water company, and regularly orders controls of the water and updating of the system.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but most US city councils plan short-term only, and don’t want to spend money because the tax-paying citizens might protest.
A public, not private, water company. Profit-oriented private companies plan short-term only. We have examples for this in the privatisation of the water companies in the UK under Thatcher, and in many South American cities. In the UK case, the water system would have needed expensive renovation of pipes, which would have raised the water price, so Thatcher followed the “free market does it cheaper” myth and sold the rights. The private companies immediately raised prices by one third and made huge profits; about 10 years later, they turned to the govt. and said “well, we didn’t spend any of the money on repairs or even basic upkeep, so now the pipes are completly bust; the money is gone to the shareholders and into our pockets and can’t be retrieved; the customers are angry, and there’s no more profit to be made, so please take it back”, and the govt. had to spend much more than the original estimation to repair the accumulated damage.
By contrast, our public water company has spent the last 30 years convincing the farmers in the Mangfall valley, where the water comes from to switch to organic farming, because this drastically lowers the amount of Nitrate that could get into the water, paying them small sums to help the switch. (Now all farmers are organic). They also buy up further area to plant trees there - the original forest is some 100 years old.
I have trouble imaging that kind of foresight and concern for public, non-profit-making, planning in the US. Considering such examples as the Colorado river, where the big farmers own all the water rights, and the small people don’t even have the right to collect the rain water that falls onto their own ground. This is unimangable over here, but standard for the US.
Maybe you have a different attitude there, but to us, the level of pollution necessary to make a river combust is unimaginable. I think that what we call a heavyily polluted river would be minor to clean river in the US.
The latest (certainly not the latest or worst) report on river pollution was in connection with the swine flu, and the huge hog farms in the US (also in Mexico, by US companies), where the sewage is collected in huge basins and then simply run off into the river, where the dead fish are floating around.
If you have dead fish, your river isn’t clean by German/European standards.
And if you have lots of dirty solutions seeping into the soil where the contaminate ground water, you don’t have good drinking water by our standards.
I did read the whole thread. And the general opinion I’m getting here is
US tap water is wonderful, nothing to worry about
People who prefer bottled water for taste are deluded because they can’t tell the difference in blind tests
People who prefer bottled water for health reasons are suckers/idiots for paying lots of money for what often is tap water simply filled into bottles anyway
US water is good!
Apparently you can’t be convinced of anything else. But if companies can sell tap water in bottles because there is no law regulating what standards bottled water has to meet, then I ** really ** don’t believe that your tap water has to meet any standards, or is controlled rigorously and regularly.
According to your standars, maybe US tap water is good enough. But we have different standards, because we try to protect the health of the people and not the profit of the companies.