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Prescription and nonprescription pharmaceuticals or their metabolites have been reported to occur at very small concentrations in some finished drinking water samples in the U.S.

The issue of lead in drinking water should be raised within the context of a holistic environmental approach that addresses all sources of lead exposure, especially for children.

This article explains the presence of measurable pharmaceutical residuals originating in municipal sewage, which, in turn, provides a means of predicting the likely appearance of individual contaminants in effluents and downstream water sources.

Canadian municipal water utilities have had to face many difficulties in the past few years: increasing water treatment and processing costs, tighter fiscal constraints, changing regulations regarding water quality, and aging and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure. Not the least of these problems has been an erosion of consumer confidence in the reliability and safety of publicly supplied tap water.

Ground water is one of British Columbia’s most precious natural resources. More than 750,000 British Columbians get their drinking water from wells, and about 75 percent of the ground water extracted in the province is used to support the B.C. economy. Demand continues to grow, and in recent years ground water has even been increasingly used as a viable source of low-temperature geothermal energy for heating and/or cooling. Despite its importance, the ground water resource has, in the past, lacked adequate legal protection.

With help from West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL), a two-year effort to protect the Sunshine Coast’s Hotel Lake from harmful water withdrawals is successful. The Environmental Appeal Board has limited the amount of water that can be withdrawn from Hotel Lake until studies demonstrate that increased water use will not harm the lake.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have published an interesting study that sheds light on the fate of a familiar pharmaceutical as it enters the waste stream. In work initially described last year, NIST chemists investigated probable chemical reactions involving acetaminophen when the drug is subjected to typical wastewater processing.

Sustainability of the planet's water resources should always be a consideration when a water supply plan is developed.

This Water Environment Research Foundation report by LK Lampe, entitled “Post-project monitoring of BMPs/SUDS to determine performance and whole-life costs”, states that, over the past 20 years, the use of Best Management Practices (BMPs) in the United States has been instrumental in reducing both the detrimental impacts to receiving water quality and the exacerbated flooding caused by urbanization and storm water drainage. More recently, Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) have started to be used in the United Kingdom.

Another 23 B.C. communities will see improvements to their drinking water and wastewater management systems as a result of almost $18 million in funding from the B.C. Ministry of Community Services.