The cost of inaction: Arsenic in water

In the last blog post on lead in drinking water, we talked about how our drinking water isn’t as safe as it should be to protect children’s brains. The EPA says that 15 parts per billion (ppb) of lead in water is good enough; but science has long known that no amount of lead is safe, and 15 ppb is nowhere near enough to protect growing minds. Lead is far from the only toxin for which our federal standards are appallingly inadequate. How did we end up with such weak limits on toxic chemicals in our water? And what are we losing by leaving them that way?

In a perfect world, scientists would identify contaminants present in water, determine the level at which toxicity is a concern for the most vulnerable members of the population, and use that to set a limit for the maximum allowed; anything above that would have to be treated for removal. 

Unfortunately, human health isn’t the only thing driving important regulatory decisions — money is too. Some (including the EPA) have argued that removing contaminants to lower levels is expensive, and therefore standards should reflect not only what is safe but also whether the cost of removal is “worth it.” But this misses a really important point: we’re really bad at correctly identifying the true costs of our weak regulations. 

Here’s just one example: the FDA currently allows arsenic in drinking water at 10ppb (parts per billion). Despite health experts suggesting that setting the limit at 3 or 5ppb was significantly better for human health, 10ppb has been used since 2001 because the EPA argued that treating water to comply with the 5ppb limit would be too expensive.

A group of researchers at the University of New Hampshire crunched the numbers and found something quite surprising. For the state of New Hampshire, upgrading arsenic removal infrastructure to reduce arsenic to 5ppb would cost a few million dollars to upgrade plus hundreds of thousands in annually recurring costs, and sure, that’s a lot. However, long-term exposure to arsenic harms the heart, is linked with cancer, and reduces IQ in children. And if you calculated the cost to society of cardiovascular, bladder, and lung cancer, the loss of productivity due to deaths that could have been avoided, and productivity lost due to a reduction in the population’s IQ, well, that value comes out to be in the billions. 

Overall, the researchers estimate that economic benefit of tightening arsenic standards would be in the range of $4.3 billion to $7.6 billion. Which means that by only focusing on the cost of upgrading our water treatment systems, we’re completely ignoring other, equally (if not more) important costs of failing to act. And of course, none of this captures the value of some things that simply cannot be monetized: the enjoyment of a healthy life that should be guaranteed for every child and adult.

We’re deep in the fight to improve water quality for everyone, especially vulnerable kids. In Maine, we pushed for more transparency in arsenic testing by requiring landlords to test for and disclose results of tests for arsenic in well water. 

You can join our grassroots effort to get water quality testing into more homes with private wells today! 

We’ve also encouraged the Maine government to consider tighter limits on arsenic. 

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