As stated in the article, this isn’t a big problem for communities with centralized water treatment systems, rather for individual homes drinking well water which is contaminated by agriculture.

In a municipal treatment plant you have a few options for removing nitrates including reverse osmosis (membrane filters with very small pores, allowing them to reject very small molecules), ion exchange (swap nitrate with another, less harmful ion), or biological treatment (use microorganisms to turn nitrate into nitrogen gas).

In your home, reverse osmosis is really the only feasible option, which can be expensive to install and costly to maintain. Ideally, some sort of tax on fertilizer would be used to pay for these in house treatments, but that would increase the cost of food.

The US is a massive country friend, there are lots of places with combined sewers (domestic wastewater and stormwater) that will bypass treatment when there is a big rain event, especially in coastal cities that discharge wastewater to the ocean. It’s not ideal but the alternative is massively oversized treatment plants or replacing all of the existing sewer infrastructure to separate the sewers. Both options would cost tens of billions of dollars in any of the large east coast cities. People are not willing to pay for that.

There are varying levels of Aphantasia, for my partner it is complete but for you if may only be partial. The wiki page I linked discussed it a bit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

My partner has Aphantasia. Brains are strange! She cannot visualize in her mind which makes it very challenging to do certain tasks and many things she does are based on muscle memory. Also interestingly when a song gets stuck in her head it is like she is making all of the sounds with her inner voice. For me, I can hear the song like there is a recording playing in my head.

Sadly this is pretty common. Here are some nasty pictures from a recent one in greater Vancouver.

I’m a water engineer with a PhD, so not a tech nerd but definitely a nerd :) I came here mostly because I find the Reddit app annoying and the app I was using came here.

The Romans used lead as a sweetener…

I don’t know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it’s cheap and easy, not because it’s their only option.

Systems that were already using activated carbon or ion exchange for organics removal may have some treatment capacity, but otherwise the first systems specifically for treating drinking water are being designed and constructed now. There are contaminated sites that already have treatment or containment in place.

This is very interesting. Currently, most ion exchange systems that remove PFAS have to dispose of their brine as hazardous waste, which is very costly and doesn’t necessarily destroy PFAS - in Florida, for example, they inject the brine into a deep aquifer.

A lot of novel technologies target PFAS destruction in these concentrated waste streams, but often further concentration is required before you can effectively destroy PFAS with advanced oxidation processes. If they could use low-UV to destroy it without further concentration or additional chemicals (beside the salt already used to regenerate the resin), ion exchange would become a much better solution for treated PFAS contaminated water.

It’s “forever” in the environmental sense that they don’t break down naturally (or at least very, very slowly). That said, “forever chemicals” is more of a media buzzword than a term that scientists use.

Exactly my workflow, but I used R Markdown!

I wrote about half of my thesis in R Markdown using Git to backup my work. It’s fantastic because you can have your plots and statistics integrated directly into your paper and formatting in Markdown is much easier than straight up latex.

Water is disinfected with either chlorine, chloramine (ammonia + chlorine), ozone, or UV light. In North America chlorine is almost universal because it provides disinfection residual, which keeps water safe while it is travelling from the treatment plant to the consumer. Fluoride is added solely as a supplement to improve dental health.

There are lots of things dissolved in our water that give it “flavour”, but the goal of all utilities is to minimize this as much as possible. Some water objectively tastes better than others, and a common segment of local drinking water conferences is a taste test. That said, for normal people usually the water they prefer is what their palette is used to. Someone who grew up drinking groundwater with very high alkalinity and pH will prefer that over surface water that is actually more “pure”. Similarly, if you normally drink water from a private well that you don’t add chlorine to, you likely dislike the taste of “city water”.

The common offenders for bad tasting water are excessive chlorine and some specific organic compounds. Both of these flavours can be removed using a granular activated carbon filter (e.g., a Britta), but you can actually remove the chlorine by just letting your water sit in the fridge for a while.

Some facts I posted in another thread about this topic;

Background info.

• PFAS is a class of chemical substances with varying properties, but in general act as surfactants.

• PFAS are considered carcinogenic and impact birth weight.

• PFAS contain a carbon-fluorine bond, which is a very strong bond that does not naturally degrade.

• Some PFAS will naturally decrease concentration over time, but only to be transformed into other compounds that will not (often PFOS).

Regulation.

• The US EPA has taken the approach of regulating a select few PFAS, generally based on their known toxicity. PFOA and PFOS will essentially be limited to a concentration of zero.

• The US EPA has been working on this for years. Mr. Biden did not snap his fingers and make a regulation. These things move much slower than that, and the industry generally feels that this process moved too quickly because there is limited understanding of how much PFAS exists in drinking water.

• Health Canada has proposed a guideline which limits PFAS to 30 ng/L (ppt) as a total sum of all compounds that can be accurately measured. Currently their guidelines limit PFOA to 200 ng/L and PFOS to 600 ng/L. Health Canada does not regulate your water provider through, that is up to your provincial/territorial government, which may have different guidelines than this.

PFAS in the environment.

• PFAS is ubiquitous in the environment due to its travel through the water cycle. It exists in Antarctic ice and on top of Mount Everest.

• Usually the largest sources of PFAS in drinking water are firefighting training areas that used PFAS containing foams (airports and military bases), landfills, certain manufacturers (metal plating, paper, semiconductors), and municipal wastewater. There are many more sources than this though.

• Landfills and municipal wastewater tend to be the highest mass loading of PFAS because of the ubiquity of PFAS in consumer products.

Treatment.

• PFAS can be destroyed using electrochemical and thermal methods, but these are not feasible for drinking water treatment.

• The current approach for drinking water treatment is adsorption to either granular activated carbon (GAC) or ion exchange resin.

• Treating PFAS at the source is always the goal instead of treating it at a water treatment plant.

Feel free to ask questions, I will do my best to answer them!

Some facts:

Background info.

• PFAS is a class of chemical substances with varying properties, but in general act as surfactants.

• PFAS are considered carcinogenic and impact birth weight.

• PFAS contain a carbon-fluorine bond, which is a very strong bond that does not naturally degrade.

• Some PFAS will naturally decrease concentration over time, but only to be transformed into other compounds that will not (often PFOS).

Regulation.

• The US EPA has taken the approach of regulating a select few PFAS, generally based on their known toxicity. PFOA and PFOS will essentially be limited to a concentration of zero.

• The US EPA has been working on this for years. Mr. Biden did not snap his fingers and make a regulation. These things move much slower than that, and the industry generally feels that this process moved too quickly because there is limited understanding of how much PFAS exists in drinking water.

• Health Canada has proposed a guideline which limits PFAS to 30 ng/L (ppt) as a total sum of all compounds that can be accurately measured. Currently their guidelines limit PFOA to 200 ng/L and PFOS to 600 ng/L. Health Canada does not regulate your water provider through, that is up to your provincial/territorial government, which may have different guidelines than this.

PFAS in the environment.

• PFAS is ubiquitous in the environment due to its travel through the water cycle. It exists in Antarctic ice and on top of Mount Everest.

• Usually the largest sources of PFAS in drinking water are firefighting training areas that used PFAS containing foams (airports and military bases), landfills, certain manufacturers (metal plating, paper, semiconductors), and municipal wastewater. There are many more sources than this though.

• Landfills and municipal wastewater tend to be the highest mass loading of PFAS because of the ubiquity of PFAS in consumer products.

Treatment.

• PFAS can be destroyed using electrochemical and thermal methods, but these are not feasible for drinking water treatment.

• The current approach for drinking water treatment is adsorption to either granular activated carbon (GAC) or ion exchange resin.

• Treating PFAS at the source is always the goal instead of treating it at a water treatment plant.

Feel free to ask questions, I will do my best to answer them!

They have settled several lawsuits already and there are more to come. It will never be enough, but it is inaccurate to say that they haven’t paid.

Not not contaminants are anthropogenic. Decomposing organic matter, heavy metals from soil and rock erosion, microorganisms and microbial by-products all naturally occur in wetlands and are dangerous to us. There’s nothing wrong with that, just don’t drink it or get it in open wounds :)

Clean is relative, there are lots of contaminants in wetland water that make it unsafe. They are incredibly important and very useful for naturally cleaning water, but please don’t drink the swamp water.