Mar 10, 2008 11:08 pm US/Central
Good Question: Can Our Water Be Pure?
(WCCO)
People all want clean, pristine, perfect water, but getting "pure" water might be an impossibility.
"If you're thinking about pure water and what you learned in school, H2O, no, the water is never H2O. It's ionized, there's H3O and HO ions in there," said Barb Liukkonen, educator at the University of Minnesota's Water Resources Center.
"It's never pure, it's never just plain H2O," she said.
According to Liukkonen, water attracts all sorts of other minerals and pollutants, both from natural and human sources. Minerals occur naturally and chemicals end up in water because of runoff. Then there are the accidental sources, like road salt, gasoline and oil.
Now we learn that traces of antibiotics and anti-depressants are turning up in the water supply, according to an exhaustive study conducted by the Associated Press.
"Something like 50 to 95 percent of the drugs that you take in pass right through your body, and so those go down the waste stream, and our wastewater treatment plants aren't designed to take out the drugs," said Liukkonen.
So why are wastewater treatment plants not designed to filter the drugs? According to Liukkonen, it is technologically possible, but not currently practical.
"If each of us uses 100 gallons a day, you can imagine the millions of gallons that need to be treated and it would be very expensive and very complex," she added.
However, don't expect an at-home well or a natural spring to necessarily be a better source for safe water.
"People often think a spring is a great source. If it's a deep aquifer, it may be. But it may be shallow water, it may be contaminated with bacteria or recent runoff," said Liukkonen.
According to Liukkonen, people need to realize that the hydrological system is a cycle. For example, Minneapolis and St. Paul get water from the Mississippi River. Many cities also dump their treated wastewater in the river. So the water people drink in Minneapolis has been flushed by someone upstream.
"By the time someone in New Orleans drinks the water, it's been through 14 other people," said Liukkonen.
"If we could differentiate between safe drinking water which we want to be more highly treated and the water that you use to wash your cars, or water the lawn, or wash our clothes, it would be less expensive," to design the perfect filtration system, she added.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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