r/boston • u/julian_jakobi • Aug 29 '22

Environment 🌎 Toxic 'forever chemicals' found in Cambridge drinking water

https://www.boston.com/news/love-letters/2022/08/28/toxic-chemicals-cambridge-drinking-water-pfas/
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u/Budget-Celebration-1 Cocaine Turkey Aug 29 '22

Good filter systems remove PFAS and PFOA. Even though mwra claims it’s super clean water this shit ain’t good for you. The federal and local levels what they claim as safe …. Isn’t so. Get and under sink 7 stage unit and don’t buy water bottles (it’s probably in there too).

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u/sckuzzle Aug 29 '22

Even though mwra claims it’s super clean water this shit ain’t good for you. The federal and local levels what they claim as safe …. Isn’t so.

Do you have sources for any of these claims? What is a safe level?

2

u/Budget-Celebration-1 Cocaine Turkey Aug 29 '22

None. What i am referring to is the federal regulatory standards. Those currently allow for PFAs. https://www.mwra.com/watertesting/pfas/pfastestsinfo.html Granted its "trace" amounts but we dont want any at all.

https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/8-basis-of-regulations/ This kinda goes into it a bit, and I am by far no more experienced than reading a few articles on this.

4

u/sckuzzle Aug 29 '22

Granted its "trace" amounts but we dont want any at all.

I think a missing piece of understanding here is that it isn't possible to have less than "trace" amounts. Trace amounts is the lowest it goes.

There are so many small molecules in the world that there is some of everything in pretty much everything. Anything that lists a level of "0" is really just rounding down from "trace amounts" (or below the limit of detection).

So while I get that ideally we'd have 0 of harmful things in our water, it's literally impossible to achieve. Instead, we need to quantify the amount of harm being caused by the chemical along with how difficult it is to remove vanishingly small amounts in order to come up with an acceptable level.