What's your definition of safe drinking water? To me, it should be free of germs that cause waterborne illnesses and free of compounds that cause cancer and other health problems, but it should also taste good.
In most areas, the municipal effort to sanitize drinking water kills the germs, but does nothing to remove the chemicals and all you can taste is chlorine.
I suppose that's why the bottled water industry brings in billions and billions of dollars every year.
But, is that really safe drinking water? It might be, but it might not.
In many cases, it's simply purified tap-water.
The purification method of choice for the industry is reverse osmosis, but that does nothing to get rid of chlorine.
Some companies use a charcoal filter to improve the taste, but that doesn't make it any healthier.
Using chlorine to sanitize drinking water, or at least kill most of the bacteria, causes another compound to form.
When the chemical chlorine interacts with microbes and is exposed to sunlight, a different compound forms.
All in all, as time goes by, as many as twenty different compounds can form as a result of chemical disinfection processes.
As a group, the compounds are referred to as trihalomethanes or THMs.
THMs are listed as "known carcinogens".
But, in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency allows their presence in supposedly safe drinking water.
One bottled water company recently had to recall all of the bottles they had shipped to the United Kingdom, because they tested positive for THMs.
So, that should answer any questions about the safety of buying bottled.
It's not the best choice.
The best choice is to sanitize drinking water in your own home.
If you have a well, today you can purchase a device that disinfects with UV light, so no chlorination or other chemical compounds are necessary.
If you are serviced by a treatment facility, then chlorination has probably already been performed, but you can further sanitize drinking water with the right purification device.
Not only will it be safe drinking water, it's the safest.
If fits all of my criteria for safety, especially the part about taste.
Removing chlorine improves the taste, but the best purification devices use an additional step to provide the best taste available.
It's called ion exchange and it makes regular tap-water taste like it came from a mountain spring.
The purifiers further sanitize drinking water by including targeted filtering media that remove all of the cancer causing compounds and other chemicals that can cause chronic health problems.
But, not every system is the same, you have to shop for the best or you won't get full protection or good taste.
You don't have to pay a fortune though.
Some of the most expensive devices do the least.
Waters purified through reverse osmosis or distillation, for example, still contains chemicals and the taste is stale, even though the devices cost more than anything else on the market.
To get really safe drinking water, you need a multi-stage device with selective filtration.
The cost is very affordable and well worth it, just to the taste buds, alone.