Recently I’ve grappled with the absurdity of drinking imported water from disposable plastic bottles on my walks along the Potomac that supplies my home. I recycle diligently, but it is at best a puny gesture. Utne magazine reports that "… only five percent of plastic waste is currently recycled in America and much of that must be fortified with huge amounts of virgin plastic." Plastic, like DDT, persists in the environment for many decades. As a dedicated cook with an environmental ethos, I want good, clean water without leaving a legacy of trash. The answer may be to install my own water filter.

San Francisco’s City Council led the way this March with a ban on plastic shopping bags, and Bay area restaurants are taking a stand for the environment by abandoning lucrative bottled water sales and installing their own water filters.

For years, I have used bottled water for coffee and cooking. I dislike the taste and smell of chlorinated tap water, which I suspect contains substances that I’d be better off not ingesting, a belief informed by snatches of stories about watershed pollution, and PCBs and dioxin in river sediments inching up the food chain into the livers of Cambodian immigrants fishing from the bridges. I wanted a simple way to avoid exposure to toxins. I believed, erroneously, that bottled water must be healthier because it comes from a pure somewhere else, like Tahiti, or Antarctica.

According to Corporate Accountability International, the bottled water industry is the fastest growing sector of the US beverage market and is a $55 billion a year business globally. Since the mid 1990s, the consumption of bottled water has doubled in the US, and three corporations, Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi, control almost half of the bottled water market.

Like plastic shopping bags, bottled water contributes to the appalling proliferation of trash across landscapes, waterways and oceans, and drives a shocking expenditure of fossil fuel. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that supplying Americans with water bottles for one year consumes more than 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to generate a year’s worth of electricity for more than 250,000 homes, or to fuel 100,000 cars.

Research by the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that while tap water may be risky, bottled water is less regulated than municipal tap water, and in some instances is less safe. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the public or municipal water supply, but it is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that regulates bottled water and then only when the product is sold across state lines. The FDA only requires that bottled water be packaged under strict sanitary conditions and that it is as good as tap water.

Shepherdstown’s water comes from the Potomac River via the Town’s water treatment plant. Installed in 1971, it utilizes a conventional, four-layer silica filtration system and coagulants to trap the sediments, and chlorine to kill microbes. Shepherdstown’s Water Board is considering different systems to conform to new more stringent Federal clean water standards, but the deadline and the projected costs have not yet been determined.

As required by federal law, the Town issues an Annual Water Quality Report, most recently in April 2006, which states that “our water system exceeds the standard or maximum contaminant level (MCL) for haloacetic acids (HAA5s).” The term refers to the byproducts formed when chlorine reacts with organic matter in raw water. The notice assures me that I do not need to use an alternative water supply, but that I should consult my doctor if I have specific health concerns. It goes on to tell me that “some people who drink water containing haloacetic acids in excess of the MCL over many years may have an increased risk of cancer.”

Scientists tell us that detection doesn’t necessarily infer toxicity, but how do we know what is safe and what is not? Watchdog website WaterWarning.com notes, "only 86 of the 75,000 toxic chemicals used in our society are required to be tested for," so EPA standards address only a partial picture of what we are actually drinking.

The American Water Works Association (www.awwa.org) has a comprehensive list of State Drinking Water Programs, and the EPA website (www.epa.gov/safewater) provides information on local water quality. You can decide for yourself if you need to remove contaminants from your tap water by having it tested by a certified laboratory. One such lab is National Testing Laboratories Ltd. (800-458-3330 or www.ntllabs.com).

Meantime, I plan to install a home water filter, and am sorting out the choices with the help of rating sources, including www.consumersearch.com, and www.waterfiltercomparison.net. Like the bottled water industry, the exploding demand for water purification products has drawn the interest of companies attempting to capitalize on the public quest for purity, sometimes with inferior and dubious products. Buyer beware!