Is Your Drinking Water Safe?

April 16, 2010

New Online Database Helps You Find Out

by Sarah (Steve) Mosko, PhD

Appeared in:

  • Santa Monica Daily Press as: Database logs pollutants in local drinking water supplies, Sept 30, 2010.
  • Southern Sierran as: Do Your Homework Before Turning on (and Drinnking From) Your Tap, But Don’t Buy Into Bottled Water as the Answer, Jul-Aug 2010.
  • E-Magazine’s ‘Our Planet Weekly’ as: Drinker Beware, April 20, 2010.
  • Fullerton Observer as: Tapping into Drinking Water Contamination, Mid April 2010, p. 9.
  • The Orange Coast Voice as:  Tapping into Drinking Water Contamination,  April 14, 2010.
  • Surf City Voice as: The Water We Drink: Is It Safe?  April 14, 2010.

Find out what contaminants lurk in your tap water. ©iStockphoto.com/deepblue4you

Americans have grown suspicious of tap water quality, yet it’s doubtful many could name a single contaminant they imagine spewing from their faucets.  Blind faith once placed in the public water supply is being transferred to bottled water, even though the average citizen probably knows equally little about pollutants that might lurk there too.

Thanks to the non-profit organization Environmental Working Group (EWG) for creating the largest-ever national drinking water-quality database, most everyone now can read about the levels and health risks of specific pollutants found in their tap water.  Unfortunately, the news is not great overall.

EWG’s database covers 48,000 communities in 45 states and catalogues millions of water quality tests performed by water utilities between 2005 and 2009.

Among the nation’s most populous cities, Pensacola, FL, Riverside, CA and Las Vegas, NV were rated the worst for water quality, testing positive for between 33 and 39 different contaminants across five years.  Arlington, TX, Providence, RI and Fort Worth, TX ranked best with just four to seven pollutants each.  The national average was eight pollutants.

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Posted by Sarah (Steve) Mosko

Stay Married to be Green

October 1, 2008

Appeared in Orange Coast Voice, October 2008, page 11

Stay married to save the planet

According to a recent investigation, divorce creates pretty hefty costs to the environment. Courtesy Orange Coast Voice

Stay Married to Stay Green
by Sarah S. Mosko, Ph.D.

If you are looking for reasons to patch up a rocky marriage, here is one you have probably overlooked – do it for the planet! While it is common knowledge that divorce can be costly to the pocketbook, a recent investigation exposes pretty hefty costs to the environment too.

Divorce is on the rise in the United States as evidenced by an increase in divorced households (households with divorced heads) from 5% to 15% of total households between 1970 and 2000. The proportion of married households (with married heads) sank from 69% to 53% over this same interval.

One spouse typically moves out during a divorce. Michigan State University researchers Eunice Yu and Jianaguo Liu hypothesized that this splitting of families should translate into more but smaller households with loss of resource use efficiency on a per person basis. Their predictions were in fact borne out by tapping into the largest publicly available census based on individual U.S. households – the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-USA.

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Posted by Sarah (Steve) Mosko