Author: cleanwaterladies

The Short Answer If your water looks like weak tea — a yellow or brown tint — and you’ve ruled out rust, you’re almost certainly looking at tannins. They’re natural organic compounds released by decaying vegetation: leaves, bark, roots, peat. The very same family of molecules gives tea its color, red wine its dryness, and…

The Short Answer If your water smells like rotten eggs, you’re smelling hydrogen sulfide — a dissolved gas, produced underground by sulfur bacteria and by sulfur in the rock, and sometimes manufactured right inside your own water heater. Your nose is extraordinarily good at detecting it: you can smell it at concentrations far below anything…

The Short Answer Trace amounts of the medications people take — antibiotics, hormones, antidepressants, painkillers, blood-pressure drugs — do turn up in drinking water. They get there mostly the way you’d guess once you think it through: your body doesn’t absorb all of any drug, so the rest is excreted, goes down the toilet, through…

The Short Answer Microplastics are exactly what they sound like: tiny fragments of plastic, smaller than 5 millimeters, that come both from larger plastic breaking down and from plastic manufactured small to begin with. The smallest, under a micrometer, are called nanoplastics. They are, by now, more or less everywhere — in oceans and rivers,…

The Short Answer VOCs — volatile organic compounds — are a large family of carbon-based industrial chemicals that share two defining traits: they’re synthetic (solvents, fuels, degreasers, dry-cleaning fluid), and they evaporate easily. Names you may know: benzene, from gasoline; TCE and PCE, the solvents behind degreasing shops and dry cleaners; vinyl chloride, from PVC…

The Short Answer VOCs — volatile organic compounds — are a large family of carbon-based industrial chemicals that share two defining traits: they’re synthetic (solvents, fuels, degreasers, dry-cleaning fluid), and they evaporate easily. Names you may know: benzene, from gasoline; TCE and PCE, the solvents behind degreasing shops and dry cleaners; vinyl chloride, from PVC…

The Short Answer These are the viruses we pointed to at the end of the Cryptosporidium profile — the smallest waterborne threats, and in one important way the most counterintuitive. Waterborne viruses like norovirus, rotavirus, and hepatitis A get into water the same way the parasites do: through feces, mostly human, usually by way of…

The Short Answer If you read the Giardia profile, this is the parasite we said was coming — and it’s the harder one. Cryptosporidium (“Crypto” for short) is a microscopic parasite, also spread by swallowing tough little capsules — here called oocysts — that get into water through feces, human or animal. It causes cryptosporidiosis:…

The Short Answer Giardia is a microscopic parasite — and like the organisms in our bacteria profile, it’s alive, which changes everything about how you find it and how you fix it. It’s the most common intestinal parasite infection in the United States; the CDC estimates it sickens more than a million people a year….