We have a filter in my house and almost everyone I know has one in pitcher form either in the fridge itself or one of those tenuously balanced units sitting underneath the faucet head. I admit my Sasquatch-like approach to household items has not served me well.
I’ve sent several of these careening into the sink, damaged irrecoverably, before I wised up and purchased the pitcher variety.Whatever kind you have, these units I believe are a testament to the ecological disaster wreaked upon our waterways. I remember talking with an older colleague at a nonprofit I used to work at, and him telling me that he grew up swimming, playing, and fishing in the brooks and rivers in and around Wayne, New Jersey in the 1970s. They cooked what they caught back then. Today, these brooks and such are unsafe for swimming. And Jersey anglers are all too tired of hearing, “Hook ‘em but don’t cook ‘em.”
Somehow, we are deluded into thinking that poisoning our water doesn’t affect us. It’s considered merely the cost of progress. Living in the northern part of the state, my water comes from the New Jersey Highlands Region, our tiny part of the Appalachian Mountains.Our water quality is thought to be among the nation’s finest. After all, Anheuser Busch still has a Budweiser plant down in Newark. But a new online water evaluator—EWG’s Tap Water Database, has instead offered some worrisome results.
Beer brewing is sensitive to water quality. Surely, mine must be good? Getty Images.
In my town, there have been incidents where they were working on a water main where we were told not to drink the water for 24-48 hours. However, most of the water quality reports we receive give surprisingly positive results. Even so, this new feature on The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) website told me all kinds of disturbing things about my water that I didn’t know before. I used to drink from the tap occasionally. Not anymore.
The EWG is an environmental research and advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C. They recently made their database available to the public with this handy page. I typed in my zip code, selected my town’s DPW and got a full list of pollutants that I could potentially come into contact with on a daily basis. In my case, there were eight in all. Five were detected “above public health guidelines.” The other three were “other detected contaminants.”…
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