We are lucky (or paranoid enough) to have installed reverse osmosis water filters for our drinking water. We have considered adding an ultraviolet light disinfector, but have not yet done so. However, as a public health risk, chlorine is one of many toxins that end up in all of our bodies, regardless of how clean ones drinking water might be. Food chain is as food chain does. Err, something like that....
Chlorine Treatment Seen as Risky:
Using chlorine to disinfect wastewater has long been standard practice. Recently, however, debate as to whether the benefits of chlorine outweigh toxic side effects has intensified. By Erica Gies.
...In 1988, SFPUC successfully petitioned the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board to eliminate requirements to disinfect water released from a pipe four miles offshore. SFPUC conducted a study with the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that tracked effluent currents and demonstrated that the bacteria died quickly in the cold, salty water and that the stream never made it shoreward, where surfers or bathers might get sick. Effluent released in the bay, closer to where people swim and fish, is still disinfected through chlorination.Sejal Choksi, San Francisco chapter director of Baykeeper, a nonprofit environmental organization, cited a study by the National Resources Defense Council showing that DBPs called trihalomethanes, or THMs, are potentially carcinogenic and correlate to an increased risk of miscarriage and birth defects.
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Arleen Navarret, regulatory manager for SFPUC Wastewater Enterprise, said she would like to see chemical residues in the effluent reduced even further.“The fewer chemicals we can put into the environment the better off we are,” she said. “I am not sure that we really understand the fate of bacteria in our receiving waters, and regulations are created by the EPA that often are designed for a particular area, and then those regulations are administered to the entire nation.”
A treatment used in five plants around the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere around the country that doesn't impart DBPs utilizes ultraviolet light, which kills bacteria by changing their genetic structures. Other promising technologies not yet in widespread use for wastewater management include ozonation, the use of membranes, peracetic acid or bromine, and even a diamond electrode-based system.
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