We know water has a fundamental impact on our health and wellbeing, yet there is still much more we need to get right about our drinking water both in developing countries and even here in Australia.
Clean drinking water was declared a human right by the UN, yet globally 1.7 billion people use a drinking source contaminated with feces. In Australia we have access to clean water but there are still concerns about potential longer term health impacts of our drinking water.
“We are starting to see an increased focus on more contaminants that we know have a greater impact on our health and wellbeing, contaminants that are linked to neurological function contaminants that are linked to cancer and other serious diseases,” Vice President, Asia Pacific, for the International WELL Building Institute Jack Noonan said.
Water testing forms part of the WELL Building Standard, a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring features of the built environment that impact human health and well-being.
“As part of the WELL project you’re required to do water testing after the project is complete,” Jack explained.
To highlight the importance of testing drinking water - even here in Australia - Jack recounted the story of a state-of-the-art government linked project that failed the lead thresholds for water quality.
“This was a really impressive project. It turns out that the brass fitting was not the brass fitting that had been specified for the project originally. There was a mistake by the contractor and because it was a poor-quality brass fitting it was leaching lead within the drinking water,” he said.
“We assume that we have good water quality in Australia because we’ve got water authorities testing the water at the plant. In reality you need to think about this as a total system or a total cycle where there are multiple parts in that cycle where something can go wrong,” he said.
A great way to ensure quality drinking water is to find a highly reputable, GreenTag certified supplier of water filtration solutions like Billi.
“We create a situation where we can change the deliverability of water depending on what the user’s preferences are,” Commercial Director at Billi Daniel Walker explained.
“First and foremost, we employ a filtration system and then we offer different levels of instantaneous delivery. We can boil that water, we can chill that water,” he said.
“We work with an organisation called BWT and they produce incredible filtration products to our spec”.
Another benefit of filtered water on tap is that people don’t need to turn to buying bottled water.
As David Baggs of Global GreenTag said “drinking water out of a reusable container is about more than just saving the container, it's about saving the embodied impacts of the carbon in that container and all the transport and extra impacts on the planet that have been avoided by not using that container”.
Ultimately Jack said providing high quality drinking water across the world requires “a systems thinking approach”.
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