A New Toxin in Our Tap Water?
An Unknown Disinfection Byproduct Now Has A Name. Plus: Big Lead Deadline Missed By Many Water Systems.
Water treatment can be a tricky science.
You can’t treat water, unless you know what’s in it. Just like a blood test for disease, you can only find what you test for. If you don’t order a specific test for a specific chemical, you won’t know it’s there.
You also can’t test the toxicity of a chemical without tracking it down first.
That’s why it’s so exciting that a team of researchers from the University of Arkansas and Switzerland have discovered a previously unknown compound in chloraminated drinking water.
Chloramines are commonly used to disinfect drinking water as a means to provide increased protection from bacterial contamination and more.
Researchers have identified chloronitramide anion, chemically expressed as Cl–N–NO2−, as an end product of inorganic chloramine decomposition.
While its toxicity is not presently known, its prevalence and similarity to other toxic compounds is concerning and warrants further study to assess its public health risk.
Simply identifying the compound has been a challenge and a breakthrough.
Understanding DBPs
Disinfection byproducts are a topic you’re familiar with, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile. Estimates say that more than 113 million U.S. tap water users drink chloraminated water.
(If you need a refresher, check out this article).
Essentially, starting in the 1970s, scientists discovered that chlorine (our main water disinfectant) could react with naturally occurring materials in the water to create what are called disinfection byproducts (DBPs).
These substances form when the disinfectant (chlorine) reacts with natural compounds in the water. Many DBPs have been shown to cause cancer, including trihalomethanes (THMs), which are a group of chemical compounds and more than 1,000 cities across the U.S. have tested positive for unsafe levels of total THMs. Yikes!
Essentially, the system is not being chlorinated properly, meaning you have too much or not enough, and sadly many cities don’t get to the root of the problem by finding the source of the organic matter.
When you know what’s in the water, you can treat it more effectively instead of creating a chemical cocktail mix. In the last 40 years, scientists have discovered more than six hundred DBPs in chlorinated tap water.
As you can imagine, the water has only become more polluted (with both organics and inorganics), creating more treatment headaches and violations.
Then along came chloramines. This alternative disinfectant method is a mixture of chlorine and ammonia. Water treatment facilities have been switching at alarming rates from chlorine to chloramines, largely to help public water systems meet federal disinfection byproduct requirements.
I would say it’s a convenient fix, but not necessarily a safe or effective one. Chloramine treatment is the cheapest way of meeting EPA regulations, but it’s one of the most dangerous ways as well.
Chlorine vs. Chloramines
While chlorine evaporates into the air relatively quickly, chloramine is more stable and will last longer in the water system.
Research has shown that chloramines cause deterioration of the municipal infrastructure thanks to changes in the water chemistry. In water systems that still use lead pipes or lead components, this reaction causes the lead and other heavy metals to leach into drinking water and out of faucets and showerheads.
Instead of spending the money to fix old pipes and update our systems, money-crunched municipalities add chemicals like ammonia to drinking water as a quick fix, which only causes more issues.
For decades, one of the chloramine decomposition byproducts remained uncharacterized, referred to simply as an “unidentified product,” and it had eluded the best efforts of chemists until now.
Julian Fairey, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, was the first co-author on the paper published in Science. Fairey noted that he began trying to unravel the mystery 10 years ago.
“It’s a very stable chemical with a low molecular weight,” Fairey said in a statement. “It’s a very difficult chemical to find. The hardest part was identifying it and proving it was the structure we were saying it was.”
This included being able to synthesize the compound in his lab, which had never been done before. Samples were then sent for analysis to his colleague and co-first author on the paper, Juliana Laszakovits, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Kristopher McNeill, Professor of Environmental Chemistry at ETH Zurich.
“Chloraminated drinking water is common in North America, but chloramination is not really practiced in Switzerland,” Laszakovits explained, “and there’s no chloronitramide anion in Swiss waters.”
McNeill noted that this “actually allowed us to use Swiss tap water as a control in the study,” adding that the current study focused on water systems in the US.
However, Italy, France, Canada, and other countries also use chloramination and could be potentially affected as well.
“It's well recognized that when we disinfect drinking water, there is some toxicity that's created,” Fairey, who studies the chemistry of drinking water disinfectants, explained in a previous interview. “Chronic toxicity, really. A certain number of people may get cancer from drinking water over several decades. But we haven't identified what chemicals are driving that toxicity. A major goal of our work is to identify these chemicals and the reaction pathways through which they form.”
Identifying this compound is an important step in that process. Whether chloronitramide anion will be linked to any cancers or has other adverse health risks will be assessed in future work by academics and regulatory agencies.
At the very least, toxicity studies can now be completed on this compound thanks to this discovery.
“Even if it is not toxic,” Fairey explained, “finding it can help us understand the pathways for how other compounds are formed, including toxins. If we know how something is formed, we can potentially control it.”
Chemical disinfection of public water supplies is still one of the greatest public health achievements our our time, helping safeguard public health and reduce cases of cholera and typhoid fever, but it’s not without a price. At least this previously unidentified compound now has a name and further studies can determine if it’s safe.
Other News
A Major Deadline Missed for Lead Pipe Identification
Have you recently heard about lead pipes near your home or water supply?
That’s thanks to revisions to the EPA’s Lead & Copper Rule that came out on 2021.
Part of those revisions required that public water systems have to comply with new rules, starting on October 16, 2024. These requirements include the initial service line inventory, notification to persons served of known or potential lead service line, public notification of a lead action level exceedance, and more.
InvestigateTV tagged along with DC Water, a utility company that serves approximately 700,000 residents in the District of Columbia, as well as provides wastewater treatment services to parts of Maryland and Northern Virginia.
The goal was for crews to inform customers about their lead replacement program, as part of the effort to meet those federal mandates to identify and replace lead pipes.
The most common sources of lead in drinking water are lead pipes, faucets, and fixtures.
But they found that the national mandate has been harder to meet than expected in many areas.
Water systems nationwide knew about the October deadline to submit their initial lead inventory numbers to their states.
InvestigateTV found that some states like Massachusetts reported 99 percent of their lead service lines, while hundreds of water departments in other states missed the deadline completely.
In Georgia, more than 400 of the 1,900 water systems in the state did not meet the deadline. In Virginia, about 20 percent of the approximately 1,500 water systems also did not turn in their inventories in time.
Many states called the process “unworkable, underfunded, and unnecessary” with an “impossible timeline.”
The next step in the process is for all states to submit their complete inventories to the EPA by March 31, 2025.
Watch the full report (above) for more details or read more here.
Worried about lead in your drinking water? Check out TapScore’s Ultimate Guide to Lead In Drinking Water.
The Gift of Water
Part of our mission for this newsletter is to give back and invest in amazing organizations working on fixing water and toxic problems throughout the country. Your subscriber dollars go direct to some of these amazing orgs, including DigDeep.
Giving Tuesday is a day to celebrate and take part in the incredible power of collective generosity, and some campaigns have extended to today.
DigDeep’s community-led projects bring clean, hot and cold running water into American homes. They also invest in research, advocacy, and workforce development to close the Water Gap once and for all.
Watch to see how Navajo Water Project Field Supervisor (& ultra-marathoner), Donovan Smallcanyon views his work connecting people to clean, running water on the Navajo Nation.
Go direct to their website to donate today!
Sound off in the comments! Are you concerned about disinfection byproducts or lead in your drinking water? What did you learn and what questions do you have?
So glad to be on a well.
I am dealing with two new toxins in my well water. PFAS which NY is at least monitoring, but recently found out TFM is being dumped into our rivers without notifications or alternative water supply for us on wells for drinking and showering and cooking. I need help to keep this toxic chemical from being dumped again in my river.