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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Is drinking water pure enough?



Drinking water is taken mainly from the lakes and rivers that are supposedly pure water. Water -full of nitrogen and phosphorous- comes out the farms to these sources contaminating them with threatening nutrients. When the water is taken to be treated for drinking, it’s not really cleaned out of nitrate and phosphorus that are toxic to the living being. Nitrate could cause blue baby syndrome to infants and affect the thyroid gland in adults.

Cleaning water from these toxics is neither easy nor cheap! It costs more than $4.8 billion annually to remove nitrate by itself, and $12-$56 million for to treat water in a town of 100,000 people from cyanobacterial blooms and cyanotoxins caused by phosphorus (USDA).

As you can see, cleaning up all these pollutants is not easy; the more practical and satisfying solution is preventing this and looking up the source. Farms and the fertilizers they use is the cause. Congress should reward farmers who try to save drinking water. It all comes from their farms and would get better if they tried to make it better. We should all unify against theses pollutions and take action. We could contact the Congress and ask for strict regulations to prevent this. We could also volunteer or donate to some agencies to check the purity of our near source for drinking water –could be your tap water-. Some of these agencies are Clean Water Action, and Clean water Network. Last but not least, a little thing that each individual could do to protect their own drinking water is using filters.


Agencies:
Clean Water Action:
Clean Water Network:

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