Interactive map: is your tap water polluted? - Lip Care Tips

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Thursday 8 July 2021

Interactive map: is your tap water polluted?

The UFC Que Choisir has just published an interactive map concerning the quality of drinking water in France. Result: 3 million people receive polluted tap water.

L’tap water, that’s quite a debate. The population is divided into two camps: those who believe that it can be drunk without problem and the others, those who swear by the bottles of mineral water. In terms of numbers, experts estimate that 20% of French people (1 in 5, in reality) do not trust tap water. To settle this delicate question, the UFC Que Choisir investigated for 2 and a half years in the whole of France.

Verdict? This Thursday, January 26, 2017, the consumer defense association published an interactive map “summarizing the level of compliance for 50 contaminants (including the lead, copper, nickel, vinyl chloride and epichlorohydrin) and physicochemical parameters ”of drinking water distributed in around 36,000 municipalities. To be sure, the most anxious consumers can type their postal code into the search engine to find out the quality of their tap water …

In 2.8 million people, tap water is polluted

First observation: 95.6% of consumers benefit from tap water that “easily respects all regulatory limits, all year round”. On the other hand, 2.8 million people (who live mainly in small rural communities) “receive non-compliant water”. In february 2014, this health problem only concerned 1.5 million French people.

The No. 1 culprit? The pesticides, linked to intensive farming: these contaminate the drinking water of 2 million consumers. Then come nitrates, which contaminate the taps of 220,000 consumers, in particular in Loiret, Seine-et-Marne, Yonne, Aube, Marne, Pas-de-Calais and Somme. Finally, bacterial contaminations (due to “lack of surveillance or obsolescence of the installations”) concern 200,000 consumers, especially in small mountain towns – the Alps, the Massif Central, the Pyrenees.