Japan's water supply

If you were grossed out by the generally reasonable idea of drinking recycled sewer water to preserve supplies, you’ll love this–as many as 41 million Americans have been drinking water tainted with trace elements of pharmaceuticals of all shapes, sizes, and effects:
JAPAN'S modern water supply system whereby clean water is provided through pressurized pipes began in Yokohama in 1887. Still, at the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), only 8.4 percent of Japan's 49.9 million people were hooked into the water supply system. Rapid development of Japan's modern water system did not begin until the 1950s. By 1987, 94 percent of Japan's 114.77 million people were served by the water supply system, greatly contributing to improved public health and hygiene. In 2000, 96.5 percent of the Japanese people were served by the public water system and the volume of water supplied through water pipelines was 17 billion cubic meters per year.

However, the public has a strong desire for sale and palatable drinking water and satisfaction with the chlorinated tap water is declining annually. Furthermore, many water treatment plants and water supply pipes are old and outdated and the time for replacing them is now.

The mainstay of water treatment technology in the twentieth century was sand filtration, but since the late 1980s membrane filtration, a water treatment process using ultra-filtration membranes or micro-filtration membranes, has been introduced. Membrane filtration has extremely high solid-liquid separation capability and maintenance is easy. Currently, there are about 90 sites in the world with UF/MF membrane filtration treatment plants with a treatment capacity of over 5,000 cubic meters/day. In Japan, membrane filtration is being used at small-scale purification plants (less than 1,000 cubic meters/day) where there is a shortage of engineers. (One Japanese household today uses approximately 1 cubic meter of water per day.)

Development of MF Technology

In Japan, the government, private sector and academia have pursued technological development research toward the application of membrane filtration technology in three stages. The Membrane Aqua Century21 Project(MAC21)(1991 1993) proved that UF/MF membranes are appropriate for removing turbidity and bacteria in small-scale water purification plants and published the "Guidelines...



• Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

• Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

• Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

• A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

• The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

The AP article is worth reading in depth–not only for the sheer staggering weight of the findings, but for how state, local, and federal officials charged with monitoring our water supplies uniformly respond with denials and ignorance. But does this really come as a surprise?

We’re one of the most overly medicated societies in the world, with every mysterious new ailment we suffer from naturally having some kind of drug or pill to remedy it. Chronic fatigue syndrome, Restless Leg syndrome, erectile dysfunction, Asperger’s, bipolar disorder, OCD, etc. I have often wondered, in fact, if many of these bizarre ailments that never seemed to exist until the last thirty years or so were not, in fact, products of our continual exposure to trace elements of harmful chemicals in our everyday life. It’s a vicious circle–we get sick from these poisons and are poisoned further with the “treatments” (never a “cure,” mind you–it’s always a “treatment”), and we end up recycling these poisons right back into our environment. Hell, we start right away with our children, exposing them to lead-tainted toys–get ‘em while they’re young, I say.

Back to the AP article:

Perhaps it’s because Americans have been taking drugs — and flushing them unmetabolized or unused — in growing amounts. Over the past five years, the number of U.S. prescriptions rose 12% to a record 3.7 billion, while non-prescription drug purchases held steady around 3.3 billion, according to IMS Health and The Nielsen Co.

“People think that if they take a medication, their body absorbs it and it disappears, but of course that’s not the case,” said EPA scientist Christian Daughton, one of the first to draw attention to the issue of pharmaceuticals in water in the United States.

We shape our environment as much as it shapes us, and if we’re ingesting billions of samples of these chemical cocktails, then shitting and pissing them back into our water, food, and air supply, is it any wonder that we’ll start soaking them right back up? Even beneficial chemicals can be dangerous in the wrong amounts, or if taken for too long a time. But because our governments and local authorities are sticking their heads in the water sand, we may need a lot more of these independent inquiries to find out just how deep and far the problem goes.

At least we can rest comfortably knowing our troops in Iraq are drinking safe water and don’t have to worry about this. Oh, wait, never mind that.
In Japan, the government, private sector and academia have pursued technological development research toward the application of membrane filtration technology in three stages. The Membrane Aqua Century21 Project(MAC21)(1991 1993) proved that UF/MF membranes are appropriate for removing turbidity and bacteria in small-scale water purification plants and published the "Guidelines...


Just as an amusing coda, as a D.C. resident, it surprises me not at all that the highest amounts of chemical traces found in my water supply were naproxen, ibuprofen, and caffeine, while San Fran gets the sex hormone. It tells you a lot, actually.