Excess of chemicals found US water

[wolram]

Seems like the US is having a raw deal, have you checked your water is safe to drink?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/0233de5148b63e6e2bd95b0fcb0daca8.htm

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I don't know, but after the whole lead scandal in Flint I've been drinking my tap water from a filter.

 

[russ_watters]

http://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2016-chromium6-lower-48.php

I drink water from a filter, but don't know if it gets rid of chromium-6...

...answer: no: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/getting-the-chromium-out-of-your-water/

The story is pretty misleading though (shocking, right?) as it is from an environmentalist group and utilizes a California "public health goal" that is 500x more stringent than the legal requirement of 10 ppb and 5,000x more stringent than the federal standard of 100 ppb (that's for all types of chromium). The headline that it "taints tap water of 218 million Americans" is misleading in that if you have a sensitive enough detector you are likely to find everything in tap water. The article argues that the CA standard was weakened by lobbyists, which is almost certainly true. But it is also almost certainly true that the "goal" was a ridiculous knee-jerk reaction to the Erin Brockovich incident...which itself may have been exaggerated, since the estimated peak concentration was only 20ppb (average; 1 ppb).

My county (Montgomery, PA) has an average of 0.2 and high of 2.6 ppb. My town's water authority didn't seem to be on the list, but I was able to google it: http://www.collegeville-pa.gov/sites/default/files/pictures/2014-WaterReport.pdf
Chromium-6 wasn't on it, but I'm not sure if that is because it wasn't detected or not.

 

[rbelli1]

chromium-6

Hexavalent chromium is disallowed in new electronics under ROHS but you can have it on abundance on anything non-electronic. Under the ROHS rules about separable materials you can have an arbitrarily small amount of a substance and still fail. Then you have chromed bumpers and no-one cares? An lead acid batteries too.

BoB