every business, school and public operation.

But it's under threat.

There are contaminants present in just about everyone's water to some degree.

Well, the ones we worry about most are arsenic, lead and PFAS.

They each have a different source and different problems.

At the moment, there is still PFAS in a lot of people's water.

There are issues with what's in the water and how it's transported.

In the United States, a water main breaks every two minutes in this country

every two minutes. So these are old systems and we need to invest in them.

Meanwhile, filtering drinking water is almost seen as a necessity in metro and

urban areas.

The water filtration market for homes was worth $10.85

billion in 2021, and is expected to grow

10.5% from 2022 to 2030 globally.

The number one reason a consumer may start thinking about filtration is

really the taste of their tap water.

And we at Brita really don't want you to have to make environmental trade offs

or turn to another beverage, knowing how healthy water is for you.

By the beginning of 2024, the EPA is planning to finalize a rule requiring

facilities to report on PFAS concentrations in tap water.

It's going to cost about $47 billion in infrastructure investments

across the US to treat for PFAS at four parts per trillion, and we think

that the ongoing cost is going to be about $700 million a

year.

What is legal is not necessarily what's safe.

So how safe is tap water in the US?

And do Americans need to be filtering everything that comes from the sink?

The US ranks only 23rd in the world for safe drinking water, which is near the

bottom of comparable nations.

US News and World Report says Hawaii, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and

Massachusetts have the best drinking water quality in the country, but J.D.

power rates the best US states for tap water as Kentucky, Washington, New

York, Oregon and Kansas.

They say the worst states are Alabama, Maryland, New Mexico, Texas and

Pennsylvania.

Rating a tap water to say where is the safest?

Where is the worst? It's a really complicated answer when you have this

mixture of contaminants that all have different end points and are toxic at

different concentrations, it's really hard.

The truth is,

There's not a geographical boundaries for where the problems are.

About 300 million Americans get their drinking water through a public water

system. It works by collecting water from a lake, river, reservoir, or

aquifer and transporting it sometimes thousands of miles away, to a water

treatment facility.

There it is, filtered and disinfected before it is distributed to

communities. That distribution usually happens first through a water main and

then through a water line from the main to a home or business.

Water mains and US infrastructure is pretty dated.

Congress has been not investing in infrastructure.

They always do a small investment of 4 to $5 billion a

year.

We need at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years to make the investments

in the water systems across the US, and so that's just really not

nearly enough.

The other thing about water systems in this country is they're very fragmented.

We have over 50,000 water systems, many of them serve less than

10,000 people.

Now, when you have a lot of small water systems like that, we have challenges

around whether those water systems are serving enough people to be able

to raise revenue, to reinvest.

In large cities where they have a lot of people they can tap into and raise

rates. But if you get to cities like Flint or struggling systems like

Jackson, where they've never have the infrastructure, the

payments to pay for it, where the people with the resources have moved

out, were often left with people who can no longer afford those.

I think that there are multiple threats to drinking water across the US, the

resiliency piece we're seeing, weather variability, climate variability all

across the US. We will see in one given location a drought, and

then three months later we'll have severe flooding.

As we have droughts, we choose from different water and it may be more

contaminated as we have floods that wash out the systems.

But then we also have toxics like arsenic, PFAS, lead

and others.

And so we have these distinct problems, but we need at least $630

billion to keep our systems up.

And that really doesn't count the investments needed for lead and PFAS,

which Congress has made a helpful down payment on but we have a lot farther to

go.

Treated water is pretty good in the US.

It's regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, under authority from

the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

93% of Americans receive their drinking water

from a community water system that is completely in

compliance with all health based standards, all the time.

We always want to make tap water safer.

But it is safe.

Just because it's treated doesn't mean that there are no contaminants present.

Those legal limits really lag behind what is known as

far as the health impacts of some of these contaminants.

We actually have health based standards for about 90 different contaminants that

are known to occur in drinking water.

In a typical water treatment procedure, contaminants like dirt are first

filtered out through a settlement or sedimentation process.

And then the clean water would go on to a filter.

We would apply different chemicals for the treatment process to improve that

process. Make it more efficient.

Chlorine is the most common disinfectant.

We add chlorine because we want that to linger in the process to keep bacteria

from growing. It may set in a tank for a while, or it may run through the

distribution system pipes for a long way before it gets to a customer's home,

maybe miles before it gets there.

Some of those byproducts can interact with the water distribution system,

resulting in contaminants in the water.

The process of disinfection is absolutely necessary to protect people

from pathogens, but there are offsets to that.

There are byproducts formed from disinfection.

Pipes as well as faucets and fixtures are some of the most common ways lead

gets into water.

Lead. The primary source are lead pipes.

So instead of it coming from the source water, it's actually from the

distribution system.

It is from the pipes that connect to the houses and the buildings.

And the problem is they leach lead into our drinking water.

Lead is known to cause physical and mental developmental delays and

decreased attention span that impairs learning.

In adults it is linked to kidney problems and high blood pressure.

And there's really no safe level of exposure has ever been identified, so we

need to get it out.

Lead was banned a couple of decades ago.

Typically, we see higher concentrations of lead pipes in older cities.

So in the northeast, Midwest.

Chicago is the city with the most amount of lead pipes in the country.

And New York City comes in third.

There's a program to try to reduce and eliminate all of those lead service

lines within ten years by 2032.

The Biden administration has set that goal.

Congress invested $15 billion and dedicated to it.

But the cost estimates now are is it's going to be around $60 billion.

So it'll come out of rates or we need more money from Congress.

Consumers should be familiar with what's in their tap water.

If they're concerned they can look up the tap water quality consumer

study reports the municipality provides that data available.

And then there are also test kits that are available.

Toxins may end up in the water supply due to industrial activities.

The contaminants that are most common in tap water are really going to vary by

region, so in some places it might be something like nitrate, which is really

big in more rural communities but is present in large urban areas as well

from fertilizer runoff and other kinds of sources.

When we look at arsenic, we find, which is a toxic

chemical that causes neurological problems.

It tends to be where there's a lot of shale and oil and gas because it's

naturally coming from there.

At least 45% of tap water in the US is known to have PFAS in it.

This map shows a sampling of where PFAS was found in drinking water in the US,

but it is not exclusive.

These per and polyfluorinated alkyl substances.

They're made by different companies that take fluorine, and they attach it

to two carbon molecules and they stick around forever.

That's why they got the nickname of forever chemicals.

We have been monitoring for PFAS for some time, and we see that it's

occurring in drinking water systems at levels of concern.

Not only is it a carcinogen, but that chemical is also undermines our

immune system. It undermines the effectiveness of vaccines, which is a

big issue.

Keeping up with new toxins is time consuming as companies are continually

developing new chemicals.

As the days go on, more chemicals get added to that PFAS designation.

Adding PFAS to the list of contaminants regulated by the EPA is taking

years.

We are now in the process of establishing a drinking water standard

for about six different PFAS.

And we plan to have a final PFAS rule, uh, by the end of the year or early

next year. After

the rule is in place, water treatment facilities need time to comply.

Most tap water is probably not going to have a system set

up at the treatment plant where PFAS is going to be able to be treated out

.

First if you can't eliminate that contamination from the source or find a

source that doesn't have it, that's ultimately the best way to do it.

But when it's there, the best way to treat for that is through granular

activated carbon or through certain resins that may have the

compound actually adhere to it and remove it from the water.

It's an effective treatment.

It's not a really complicated treatment, but it can be very costly.

But at the moment there's still PFAS in a lot of people's water.

The majority of exposure to these contaminants happens from drinking the

water, not from showering or brushing your teeth.

And with chemical contaminants a lot of the times, you can't boil off the

contaminants the way that you can boil water to disinfect it.

The water filtration market is expected to grow about 50% from 2023 to

2030. The major companies in the space are A.O.

Smith Corporation, Brita LP, which is owned by Clorox, Pentair PLC,

and Helen of Troy Limited, which makes the PUR water filters.

There are a lot of different types of water filters, but the most common are

carbon filtration or gravity, reverse osmosis, ion filtration, UV

light or others.

There absolutely does need to be some sort of additional treatment, probably

in most areas across the United States depending on the contaminant.

But that's going to be site specific.

We at Brita really don't want you to have to trade off between great quality

water and sort of environmental impact.

We want to keep you from turning to bottled water usage in your home.

And so filtration is a great option for that.

Relying on filters.

People without the money aren't going to be able to do that.

But if it helps you feel more confident about your water, go for it.

If you use a filter longer than the manufacturer suggests, there's a good

chance that you're actually degrading the quality of your water to a

significant amount.

But we really believe that the people who who are responsible for the

contamination should have to pay for this, not our customers.

More treatment is necessary if that's some sort of extra step of filtration at

the plant or even, you know, protections upstream from the plant,

keeping a lot of these chemicals out of the environment to begin with is very

possible in a lot of situations.

Read your water bill.

Find out the quality of your water.

That is the best thing that people can do to protect themselves and their

families.