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Whole House Water Filter
Whole house water filters are an easy and convenient way to get high-quality, great-tasting tap water in your home. These filters hook up to your home’s main water supply, and then after stripping out contaminants, filtered water gets sent to your home’s pipes to feed into your faucets, showerheads, toilets, and appliances. Unlike other water […]
How do Water Filters Work & Are They Beneficial?
Clean and crystal-clear is more than just a catchphrase, it’s our expectation of what water should be. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends over 3 liters of daily water intake for adults.[1] Of course, this recommendation varies depending on age, sex, activity level, health, and other factors. All of earth’s living creatures […]
Learn More About Drinking Water Standards
EPA Drinking Water Standards
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the limits of contaminants in the water for public consumption provided by public water systems in order to protect public health. The authority given to the EPA to set standards and regulations comes out of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), enacted by Congress in 1974 and twice amended and reauthorized in 1986 and 1996. The EPA works with over 150,000 public water systems that serve over 300 million people, to protect against exposure to naturally occurring and man-made contaminants. The process of regulation underlined in SDWA leads to the development of a national primary drinking water regulation in the future.
The EPA has set standards that regulate and control the level of contaminants in the nation’s drinking water. They require set monitoring schedules and methods to measure the number of contaminants in the water most of the population drinks. Under the SDWA these standards are part of the “multiple barriers,” to protect drinking water. They include the assessment and protection of drinking water sources, protecting wells and collection systems, as well as making sure water is properly treated by experts in the field. Other standards include establishing principles of distribution systems and making information about the quality of water available to the public.
Primary Drinking Water Standards
National Primary Drinking Water regulations set mandatory water quality standards for contaminants found in drinking water. These standards are determined by taking into consideration the impact of the contaminants on people’s health and by looking at what is technologically and economically feasible for the water treatment facilities. These national regulations also provide treatment technique requirements for maximum allowable level of a contaminant in water available to users of a public water system. These legally enforceable standards limit the levels of specific contaminants maximum contaminant levels (MCL) and are established to protect the public against consuming water that presents a risk to human health.
Secondary Drinking Water Standards
Secondary drinking water standards are unenforceable federal guidelines regarding aesthetic effects such as taste, odor, color, and non-aesthetic effects such as skin or tooth discoloration in drinking water. The contaminants classified under secondary drinking water standards do not present a risk to human health. Public water systems may test for these contaminants on a voluntary basis.
EPA recommends these standards to the states as reasonable goals, but because they are not mandatory, federal law does not require water systems to comply with them. States may, however, adopt their own enforceable regulations governing these contaminants.