Bulk water treatment is very different to preparing drinking water.
First, about 350 times more bulk water is made than what people drink. We commend our colleagues in the bulk water industry for their remarkably professional work (not everywhere, for sure, but as a whole, it is an industry performing to very high standards). The challenges they face in providing drinkable tap water to hundreds of millions of people, are immense.
A second difference between bulk/tap water and drinking water is that tap water is drinkable, but not necessarily good for long-term consumption. Without going into the detail, here are the main points:-
1. The water sources of the world are becoming increasingly more polluted –
chemically as well as biologically. This has a lot to do with population growth and ageing infrastructure and is thus steadily getting worse.
2. Bulk water treatment technology is limited in its capacity to filter out chemicals – thousands of undesirable chemical compounds slip through. While tap water is generally “safe” to drink (albeit very often unpleasant), the long-term effects of consuming these “chemical cocktails” is unpredictable and of great concern to many health practitioners.
3. Heavy doses of disinfectants (usually chlorine, chloramine or ozone) are added to kill dangerous micro-organisms in bulk water. While these aggressive chemicals kill those pathogens, they also cause numerous disinfection by-products that are unhealthy.
To preserve one’s long term health, it is important to stop consuming tap water, whether by drinking it or by cooking with it. If tap water is used as source-water and radically purified (by Reverse Osmosis for example) and re-mineralised, a good, healthy drinking water can be made. This is what iXi Water is all about.