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The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in the US has published a new report on concentrations of Atrazine detected in surface and ground waters. There is an interesting interactive map and a link to the pdf at their website.
Interestingly, the controversy at the heart of this report is one familiar to many reclaimed water researchers: missing peaks and averages.
Sometimes some things leave you almost speechless. We spotted this sign at the health food shop at our local plaza.
Sign advertising water purifiers
One important research area for Smart Water is Risk Communication. Part of the function of this blog is to address public concerns about reclaimed water and other important water safety issues. To launch our blog, here is a video posted recently on YouTube by dontpoisonme.
The author of the video raises some concerns that many people share. We will address these and many others over the coming months in this blog. But let’s start here with his concern about ‘unknown unknowns’. It may have been better if this phrase had walked out and faded into oblivion with its author, but it has entered the lexicon and we have used it. So let’s look at what is known and unknown about chemicals in the water.
We do know what chemicals can be used in Australia. It is not legal to import or manufacture a chemical that is not on the inventory of the chemical regulators unless you have a certificate or permit to do so. This means we have a pretty good idea of what isn’t there. More on this in a future post.
Not all chemicals can be detected and/or quantified in water. There can be a lot of work in developing methods for chemical analysis. Some of them are pretty tricky. We can take into account some of the characteristics of the chemical, its pattern and volume of use and estimate the likelihood that the chemical will end up in water. This is an important part of the risk assessment process, and we will also post more on this.
The important thing for us as researchers is how to determine if the water is safe if we can’t measure all the chemicals that are in it. The short answer to that is that even if we could measure all the chemicals that are in it, it wouldn’t tell us if the water was safe. We have to come up with another way of testing the safety of the water even if we don’t know its exact composition. So we test the whole water as if it were a single toxin.
Now toxicity testing takes a long time, it is very expensive, it uses animals. Water varies enormously, even over short time frames. So we need tests that are fast (real-time would be great), relevant, economical. We want results that are meaningful to the public who consume the water, the service providers who treat it and the regulators who control it. It’s a tall order, but we’re committed to doing it. After all, we drink the water too.
