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Kitchen Table Kibitzing June 1, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-01
Tap Water
The other day as I observed someone moving into one of our units, I was surprised to see an entire pallet of bottled water. I might have one bottle every 5 years, so it looked like a lifetime supply to me. Every Costco trip I see folks with case after case of that water,
Globally, approximately 1.3 billion plastic water bottles are used each day. In the US, over 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away daily. So it’s not just the water, it’s the bottle disposal.
In last week’s N Y Times there was an article titled The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water.
Tap water is great. It’s incredible that we’ve worked out a system in which anyone with a faucet can get it. It is cheap and plentiful, and it connects you to the ecosystem around you — the shared resource pulling you into contact with all the other plant and animal life around. It might taste better in some places than in others, but whenever you drink it, you are reckoning with some sense of home. Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens.
At our farm we are privileged to drink excellent (and tested) well water. Moving to our condo we found a slight nuance of chlorine in our tap water, which dissipated to the air in minutes.
Then there’s the issue of microplastics.
To test their new high-throughput imaging platform, the team analyzed the micro- and nanoplastics in three popular brands of bottled water. Results were reported on January 8, 2024, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that, on average, a liter of bottled water included about 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. About 90% of these plastic fragments were nanoplastics. This total was 10 to 100 times more plastic particles than seen in earlier studies, which mostly focused on larger microplastics. link
Other studies are less extreme:: “As our infographic shows, the biggest known source of microplastic which enters our bodies is bottled water. Based on 4 separate studies, the average number of particles per liter is 94.”
I couldn’t find the source of this, but it sounds properly terrifying: “Scientists have estimated that adults ingest the equivalent of one credit card per week in microplastics. Studies in animals and human cells suggest microplastics exposure could be linked to cancer, heart attacks, reproductive problems and a host of other harms.”
Dartgnan covered another issue, fluoridation, in yesterday’s KTK.
As the AP article notes, “Kennedy cannot order communities to stop fluoridation, but he can direct the CDC to stop recommending it and work with the EPA to change the allowed amount.” Except that based on the overwhelming consensus of the medical and dental community, there is no sound scientific rationale for eliminating or “altering” those amounts of fluoride currently in use by one-third of the country’s community water systems.
What to do? I think I’ll stick to wine. Oh, wait.
Yes, microplastics have been found in wine. Studies have shown that synthetic corks in white wine bottles can release microplastics into the wine.Additionally, microplastics can enter wine from various sources like water sources, raw materials, and even the vineyard environment.
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