It's also significantly more expensive than buying a filter.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.
Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.
Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.
Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
In basically the entire first world: yes, drinkable tap water is the norm. Even living in the middle of nowhere USA, you have well water and it is perfectly drinkable. (That is to say, rural American homes have their own well, water pump, and filtration system)
there’s really only pressure a few hours per week
Water towers are common and completely solve this issue. Even during power outages, gravity still works and water towers provide pressurized, drinkable water to everyone in the area.
You should look into getting a well installed. This is something you and your immediate neighbors could all benefit from and could go in together on if you can't afford it yourself.
If you don't mind me asking, what country do you live in? What you are saying is not something that is common in entire continents.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
Thank you for the detail. I haven't seen much on how such things work outside of documentaries and relief donation drives.
Good luck man. <3
Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.
Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.
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That sounds really bad. Simple access to clean water should be available everywhere to everyone.
We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.
My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?
Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.
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Yes, in a lot of places, the municipal water is perfectly fine to drink. We penalize people who contaminate the groundwater, and the infrastructure is maintained well enough.
We still have water main breaks that result in a boil-water order, because a break in the pipe means bacteria could enter, but I've never had one in any place I've lived in the US.
I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
I can’t specifically speak to watering golf courses as I’m not a golfsman (or whatever they’re called) but as far as washing floors and flushing toilets? In the west yes that is precious drinking water.
As you say you’re familiar with how the system works so you understand that it is far cheaper to have one system of infrastructure to deliver water and have all of that water be drinkable rather than have two sets of pipes where one delivers non-potable water for washing and flushing and one for just drinking water.
Is it wasteful to wash and flush with drinking water? Yeah maybe. Is it also wasteful to maintain two sets of infrastructure just to save drinking water? Also yes
Generally, we just plain don't have water contamination like that. We have enough enforcement of groundwater protection, enough people that care to avoid contamination in the first place, and enough supply from groundwater or snowmelt that even if one source has minor contamination, we can switch to another until it's remediated or within safe levels.
Which is also why we can afford to use potable water for those purposes. There's enough of it to go around; it's not precious here.
Well, except in California and the desert parts of the US, where they're diverting so much of the Colorado river that the further down the river you go, it gets smaller instead of bigger, until sometimes there's no river at all.
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
As the other person said, yes on the former two, not really on the latter (though there are exceptions).
For an individual, everything is just the one, potable, water supply. Showers, clothes washing, drinking water, lawn watering (though most people don't water their lawns, it's expensive and grass grows just fine by itself). It is more complicated and expensive to deal with a secondary water system for homes to have a non-potable water system, so nobody does. One's water bill is generally the cheapest utility bill.
Fire hydrants hook up to the potable system as well. As that is the only pressurized water that's really available. Though, some places have taps into lakes and such for when the water system runs dry during large-scale fire-fighting. Think massive forest fires.
Farms, golf courses, data centers, nuclear plants, and other industrial uses generally have a secondary water source that isn't potable. These are generally lightly treated well, river, or lake water. This is mostly for cost reasons as full water treatment gets pricey when you are using that much water.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction
That's actually a super interesting topic! In areas with aging infrastructure in first world countries, they intentionally up the mineral content of the water so it forms a second wall so to speak on top of the pipes, keeping it much more sanitary. (Paraphrased). Primarily for lead. Generally though, the constant flow of water running keeps things much cleaner than you might think.
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Clay filters are a nice and cheap option for places where tap water isn't drinkable. it's cheaper than any kind of bottled water and they even have the capacity to remove some of the microplastics!
Seeing the report about my local water having too much of 4 things it shouldn't, I'm OK with bottled till I can figure out how to get my mom onboard with a filter.
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That's why I have a reverse osmosis system and use it to refill my plastic arrowhead bottles!
Best of both worlds!
I did. But the filter is plastic and so is the pitcher!
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"Particles" is almost useless as a measure. They're not movie tickets, I'm not interested in their discreet number. Give me a defined quantity. Is 10,000 particles 1 gram, half a gram, a tenth of a gram, what?
"You're eating far too many particles of salt, we're going to need to to cut back by at least 2,000 particles every lunar cycle."
It's also meaningless without the context of how many particles other people consume.
She found that people ingest an average of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year from food and drinking water, and those who use bottled water on a daily basis ingest nearly 90,000 more microplastic particles into their bodies.
Aha! So, now a more informative headline could be something like, "People Who Drink Bottled Water on a Daily Basis Ingest 3 Times as Many Microplastic Particles Each Year."
Which I would argue is also far scarier than just some out of context bigish number.
But, I'm with you on ditching "particles" altogether and providing it in a standard measurement.
Good point. But particle size is also important. Swallow a small sphere of 10g of plastic and it passes through you largely without consequence. 10g of nanoparticles and its in every one of your organs doing god knows what.
Which is kind of what I'm getting at. I've read that we have the equivalent to as much as a crayons worth of micro plastics in our brain. A crayon, while not particularly scientific, puts a pretty fine point on the issue in an intuitive sense, and also addresses the cumulative nature of the pollution. By the head line it seems like they are only talking about a certain sized micro plastic, and without further context they might as well just say "a lot".
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I don’t know how to judge 90,000 microplastic particles as a quantity.
That's the fun thing about all this. Nobody knows. Is it much? Is it nothing? Is it dangerous? There is no people without microplastics in them, there is no way to have the control group for an experiement.
Everyone kinda suspects it can't be good, nobody has any fucking idea is it really
I mean they could set in relation to the absolute values. Does a person who doesn't drink bottled water ingests 100 or 100.000 particles?
Oh, that's measurable. What isn't exactly measurable is what ingesting whatever number of particles does to you
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Ironically glass may shed more micro plastics...
Researchers, including those from the French food safety agency ANSES, found an average of around 100 microplastic particles per litre in glass bottles of soft drinks, lemonade, tea, and beer.
This could be five to 50 times greater than the rate found in plastic bottles or metal cans, scientists say.
I'm skeptical about that study. I did stop buying glass bottles after seeing this (I was also swayed by them being more expensive and smaller) but intuitively it doesn't make sense to me that just particles from the bottle cap could cause more microplastics than the entire bottle made of plastic.
Acting like every plastic is the same makes as much sense as acting like every metal is the same...
But it seems it has more to do with the sealing process used.
Caps are painted/coated, then crimped around the outside of the bottle. It sounds like the crimper never gets cleaned, and since it's not sealed till crimped, we get some of those tiny particles shot into the bottle from the force of it.
So to bring it all back, the plastic bottles are manufactured with plastic that is "food safe". The coating on the caps is not. So very little leaches from a bottle, everything from the cap dust is just going to float around in there.
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From the article linked by u/givesomefucks:
The study could not directly establish whether there was any health risk from the consumption of such beverages sold in glass bottles or not, due to the lack of toxicological data.
The plastic particles turned out to be contamination matching the paint of the caps, so it is different types of plastic, and that could be either better or worse.
Seems like cans are the safest option.
Well, my area has tons of nitrates (and other shit) that gives us a much higher rate of cancer. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do I guess.
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every now and then, on days like this, I am reminded that some countries don't think potable water is a basic right for their citizens
As someone who's worked on a millionaire's yacht that refused to drink anything besides a gallon of Fiji a day and produced more plastic waste than all of West Palm Beach combined, thanks. This is the sweetest slice of schadenfreude pie I've had all week 🥧
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People are making fun of me because I'm going out of my way to avoid plastics. "You've already been exposed to decades worth" and "You'll never avoid it all" and a bunch of other logical fallacies borne out of good old fashioned defeatism.
Crinkly thin water bottles are the worst, as are bottles that have been exposed to UV light, so if you HAVE to use bottled water try and find thick PET bottles and keep them out of the sun.
I always thought it was funny (not haha) that bottlers use this relatively unstable plastic to create the bottles with which to store the water they sell.
Mexico City be in a spot.
Yeah, my entire country relies on bottled water. I can't drink from the tap. I need to buy carboys constantly because we can't really afford a water filter right now, and I doubt it'd come out as pure anyway. Of all the great things we do have, potable water for human consumption isn't one of them. *sad Mexican noises*
E: On the bright side, you may be able to get a glass carboy and fill it up at one of the new refilling centers that are popping up all around the city, so at least you have a say on the type of container you use and get your water all at a fraction of the price that Coke and Pepsi sell it for!
How bad is it compared to RO? The membranes, pipes, fittings are all plastic.
She found that people ingest an average of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year from food and drinking water, and those who use bottled water on a daily basis ingest nearly 90,000 more microplastic particles into their bodies.
So it doubles the intake.
Isn't that triple? It's saying 90k more not total
Good thing I only drink bottled soda
But my tap water has PFAS and lead...so I guess I get to pick my poison?
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that's two orders of magnitude lower than being of significance. they're microplastics. i might end up with a centiplastic at most that way. call me when they figure out how to get a million more plastics
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