The Misconception of Tap Water: It's Not Going to Kill You

The Misconception of Tap Water: It’s Not Going to Kill You

by Kyu Park

 

            If you were given two cups of water, one cup of tap water and another with bottled water, would you be able to distinguish the two? Maybe- by the subtle taste of chloride often added in tap water to prevent contamination in its distribution process. Yet other than the taste of chloride, which is completely harmless to the body, people cannot actually detect the dangerous contaminants simply by taste. Nevertheless, bottled water has become so popular that there are over 900 water bottle companies in America. Many of these companies flourish due to the popular misconception that tap water is unhealthy. Why are so many Koreans biased against tap water when taste is a misleading detection of harmful contaminants?

            Water, being a necessity in so many aspects of life, has been embedded in society’s culture. Hence, for any society that has had a constant supply of clean water from the past, it is natural to have faith in tap water. Yet, South Korea has been a quickly developing country with not a long history of clean water. The earliest records of public wells in the 1912 claim that they were not neither properly managed nor strictly regulated. Of the 9,241 wells in Seoul, only 12% were safe to drink. For over the course of a century, the water distribution companies have improved much but there is still public skepticism regarding the quality of tap water. From a survey conducted in 2005, 3,200 adults voiced their opinion on why they felt tap water is unsafe to drink. The results included: general anxiety 43.9%, smell 26.3%, rust stains 12.2%, media claiming that tap water is unsafe 6.2%, visible taints 6.0%, taste 5.1%, fear of chemicals 0.2%. As seen from the survey, the most common reason that Koreans refused to drink tap water is “general anxiety.” Without much justification or reasoning behind their refusal, Koreans are nervous to drink tap water because they carry their biases on the fact that tap water has been unsafe in the past. This has led Koreans to have one of the biggest markets of water filters (정수기). Water filter companies advertise that water filters ensure tap water to become ‘edible’ and ‘clean’ through complicated filtering processes. Thus, with the purchase of water filters, more of the Korean populations began to use tap water for drinking purposes. From the year 2000 to the year 2010, there has been a 10% increase in the households that drink tap water, and of those who use water filters to drink tap water, there has been a threefold increase. On the other hand, however, there also has been a twofold increase in the number of households who use bottled water as their drinking water. There is no guarantee that bottled water has gone through more filtering. Other than the extra cost of buying water, we pay the price of pollution and energy. Americans buy 29 million bottles of bottled water a year, which uses 17 million barrels of cruel oil. This is an amount enough to keep a million cars going for 12 months. Other than the ‘recyclable’ bottles of plastic, which also cause plastic pollution, there is a waste in ‘un-recyclable’ energy. To avoid such costs of bottled water, opting for tap water is the natural solution. As Korea develop to be a safer country, its people should have more faith in its tap water.

 

            Korean-Americans also demonstrated the same bias against tap water, a bias rooted from the cultural knowledge of Korea’s water for generations. However, California prides itself for having drinkable tap water. And the various tests that qualify the World Health Organization (WHO) and California Department of Public Health (CDPH) prove its safety. Many people in the states drink tap water and uses less complicated filters. Due to the fear carried over from Korea, many Korean-Americans refuse to drink tap water even in the states: a new, different, yet safe environment. This shows fear in the extent of tap-water-phobia, rooted from the lack of trust in water and its environment from Korea.

            Yet like the tap water of most of the United States, Korea’s tap water has been through remarkable heaps of improvement. In a recent test on tap water in the schools of 25 districts of Seoul, each and every one of them proved to be perfectly edible and safe. This proves that our fear towards tap water is outdated- no longer should we fear that tap water is unsafe, as the strict regulations of the Korean health department checks for healthy tap water. Drinking tap water not only reflects a person’s habit, it reflects one’s faith in the surrounding environment.  As citizens or residents of a credible country, Korea, we need not avoid tap water, and should simply appreciate its cleanness and availability.