Conservation of Water Quality and Watershed Health:  Drinking Water

[this section first drafted by Carol Armstrong]

This overview focuses on risks and impacts to human uses of water, and only marginally addresses problems for aquatic species, biodiversity, and ecological systems (a future article).  It does not address all the components of concern in our water.  Threats to the water quality in the United States including Pennsylvania are:

• Runoff Pollution and Sediments from Impervious Surfaces: our driveways, parking lots, lawns, sidewalks, construction sites, ball fields and other developed grass fields, buildings and roofs, highways and roads, paved trails, all of which usually discharge directly into streams and eventually lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, bays, and oceans upon which we are dependent;

• Fossil Fuel Extraction and Transportation including coal, other mines, oil, and gas, which reach our surface and ground water supplies; infrastructure operation and accidents also take clean water from the environment and release water with industrial chemicals used for extraction into our freshwater supplies;
  
  

• Industrial Pollution because we continue to permit industrial facilities to release pollutants into natural waterways, and we have many landfills, Superfund sites, and State hazardous waste programs that leak and runoff to streams and other waterways;
  
  

• Agricultural Pollution produces excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorous that cause eutrophication (too many nutrients) of our streams, rivers, estuaries, and bays which indirectly cause oxygen deprivation and destroy aquatic ecological systems; also excessive levels of herbicides and pesticides, ammonia, and nitrous oxide, as well as excessive levels of sediment that smothers aquatic life that live on the stream and estuary/bay bed;
  
  

• Air Pollution is a significant source of water pollution, such as acid rain, and comes from airborne emissions and atmospheric dust and greenhouse gases that are absorbed into water;
  
  

• Sewage Treatment Plants because even the most updated sewage treatment plants cannot filter out the various pollutants and chemicals.
  
  Cities with combined sewer overflows (CSO, associated with older cities) are permitted by law to spew untreated and raw sewage directly into a stream or river or other body of water during rain that overwhelms a treatment facility. A CSO is a combined sewer system that is designed to collect and combine rainwater runoff, domestic sewage, and industrial wastewater in the same pipe. Most of the time, combined sewer systems transport all of their wastewater to a sewage treatment plant where it is treated and then discharged to a water body. However, when the volume of wastewater exceeds the capacity of the treatment plant or sewer system, untreated stormwater and wastewater discharges directly to nearby streams, rivers, and other water bodies.
  
  The Philadelphia Water Department reports there are 164 CSOs in Philadelphia that discharge to Cobbs Creek, Tacony Creek, tidal Pennypack Creek, Schuylkill River, and Delaware River. 
  
  Philadelphia also has 455 stormwater outfalls in every watershed in Philadelphia, which spews into the nearby stream water from street inlets, building downspouts, and other storm sewer lines. 
  
  Pennsylvania is a state with one of the greatest number of cities with CSO outfalls directly to streams and rivers. Other cities in our area with CSOs are Norristown, Chester, Bethlehem, and Harrisburg. The EPA reports there are 860 municipalities with combined sewer systems in the U.S. (even California has 36 CSOs in two cities).
  
  Philadelphia is a world leader in water quality, and their strategy is to reduce 85% of their CSOs by building thousands of green infrastructure sites.  Other towns can model this locally, as it is less expensive in the short term, and in the long term, than replacing or upgrading sewer treatment plants.  
  
  

Drinking water supplies in the U.S. are among the safest in the world, however, our drinking water sources are becoming contaminated. Public Water Treatment can remove:

• Dirt and other dissolved particles -- These are removed by adding chemicals (chlorine, iodine, oxidizing agents) that bind with the particles and form larger particles, called floc, that are filtered;

• Parasites, bacteria, and viruses -- These are removed by filters;

• Remaining pathogens -- Chlorine or chloramine may be added to kill remaining pathogens;

• Suspended solids such as algae and fungi are removed;

• Minerals such as iron and manganese are filtered;

• Much of phosphorus, in the form of phosphates (from soils/rocks, human and other animal waste, detergents, food residues) are dissolved and removed by water treatment plants with that capacity (usually not the food and beverage industry wastewater treatment systems);

• About 50% of nitrogen is removed by water treatment systems.

Water treatment plants do not remove:

• About half of our medications;

• Salts are not currently removed, though chlorides in drinking water in the northern U.S. are reaching the maximum for drinkable water, and the solutions will be expensive;

• The EPA reported in 2016 that personal care products are increasingly being detected at low levels in surface water, and may impact aquatic life, and are being consumed by humans in combinations that we cannot predict;

• Many “contaminants of emerging concern”, that are commonly derived from municipal, agricultural, and industrial wastewater and other pathways, are endocrine disruptors that alter the normal functions of hormones causing a variety of health effects;

• Arsenic is used in pesticides and agriculture; organophosphate pesticides are being phased out and replaced with glyphosate, pyrethrinoids, and neonicotinoids, which are less harmful but which are unhealthy for plants and animals;

• Home filters are needed to remove lead, chlorine (but chloramine is more difficult to remove), and other contaminants;

• PCBs (and other polychlorinated compounds) were in strong industrial use until 1977; they persist in the environment, are toxic, and they bioamplify along food webs as far as the earth’s poles;

• Polybrominated compounds are used as flame retardants that replaced polychlorinated compounds, have also appeared in the Arctic and Antarctic environments and some are now being regulated;

• Neonicotinoids are persistent in the environment and target ‘pests’ as well as pollinators, particularly honey bees;

• Plasticizers are added to synthetic resins to increase the flexibility of plastics, and are endocrine disruptors that are not filtered out by sewage treatment plants;

• PPFAs (perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls) are fume suppressants and aqueous film forming foams that persist in the environment, bioaccumulate, and cause immunotoxic and hepatotoxic toxicity;

• The EPA published health advisories for PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid, used worldwide as an industrial surfactant and fed to meat animals) and PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, was a key ingredient in Scotchgard and in stain repellents) both of which are extremely persistent in the environment.  Several states including Pennsylvania are investigating and developing systems for the identification of risk in residents, treatment of residents, and prevention of PFOA and PFOS from reaching drinking water.

As always, prevention is much less expensive than cure. Research is seeking methods to derive energy, chemicals for commercial markets (such as phosphorus, iron, calcium, aluminum salts), and clean water from sewage.  Sewage sludge has long been proposed for incineration and then use, but it retains many harmful metals and chemicals (such as dioxin), and is a health risk.  . A new trend is the recycling of water for industrial use that the industry reuses (e.g., beer brewing and in-door farming), rather than drawing more fresh water. A large mushroom farm in Kennett Square PA has accomplished this with great reduction in spraying of wastewater onto fields that then seeps down to surface and ground waters. Now mushroom production is recycling their water on site so that it is reused. Will our towns and states have the resources for these advanced water treatment facilities?  Increasing regulation and updated water treatment systems will come with increases in taxes, savings in water treatment, and/or new funding sources in order to try to keep up with the chemicals accumulating in our soil, water, food sources, and our bodies.  

What can you do as an individual? 

Take time to think about your purchases, and try to refuse, reduce, and find nontoxic and simple alternatives for using plastics, processed food, medications, beauty and personal care products, cleaning products, clothing made from synthetic materials, lawn products, pesticides, conventionally farmed food, and meat/fish.

What have we done locally? 

On May 9, 2020, Sierra Club co-hosted an informative webinar about water quality in Chester County. The recorded presentation by Dr Ensign from the Stroud Water Research Institute is HERE.