Water is one hundred percent necessary for life. When that resource becomes polluted, people begin to fall sick, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it. Because of increasingly polluted city water, many people have taken to purchasing water filters or hundreds of water bottles. However, these are very expensive alternatives, although they do ensure higher levels of water quality. All is not grim for our water supply though. Proposed legislation will further tighten drinking water quality standards, so there will be even less pollutants than ever before.

Some Very Serious Risks

Drinking water quality standards are in place to severely limit the amount of pollutants that are legally allowed in our water supply. With current technology, it would be impossible to completely remove all of the naturally occurring pollutants in drinking water, like lead and copper, but they are fairly easily and cheaply reduced. Other more life threatening pollutants, like arsenic and radon, also occur naturally, but we are fortunately capable of minimizing the amount of those pollutants that enter the water. Without drinking water quality standards, many municipalities and cities might choose to ignore the problems, and poorer regions might not be able to receive funding if there were no drinking water quality standards to legally require that pollutants be removed from the water.

Guidelines for drinking water quality are all well and good, but they are completely incapable of fixing the problem. When pollutants are detected in the water supply, then agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency have the authority to bring about real solutions, whether that means requiring companies to adhere to stricter guidelines for properly disposing of waste or providing upgrades for water treatment facilities. Drinking water quality standards are only tools for determining the safety of the supply of drinking water.

If you are connected to your town's water supply, this testing will be taken care of automatically for you. However, if you get your water from a well, then you will need to schedule an appointment for a water testing company to verify the safety of the contents of your well. If you would like to test the water yourself, you can purchase a variety of kits to help you get a fairly strong idea of how safe your water is, but you'll still want to have a third party tester accurately verify your water supply on a regular basis. By adhering to all the drinking water quality standards, you will always have a safe source of water from which to drink from.