Every time you wash your tub with a cleaner, rinse off make-up or suntan lotion, pour coffee down the drain, or flush old prescription drugs, small amounts of their chemical components end up in the water supply. Maybe the most surprising source of pollutants is our own waste. Whenever you go to the bathroom, you're excreting small bits of everything you take — all the prescription and illegal drugs, the caffeine and nicotine, the aspirin and cough medicine. With most of these substances, small portions make it out of your body unaltered or just slightly changed. Don't expect treatment to catch these nasties. The Environmental Protection Agency baldly declares: “No municipal sewage treatment plants are engineered for PPCP removal.” (“PPCP” stands for “pharmaceuticals and personal care products.”)
The EPA first discovered a pharmaceutical chemical in water in 1976, but the emphasis at the time was on industrial pollutants, so no one paid much attention to it. In the 1980s, Europe started studying this kind of contamination in earnest. The US got in on the act in the mid-1990s, but PPCP pollution is still under the radar. In fact, of the major environmentalism websites I checked, none of them discussed pharmaceuticals and other personal care products in our drinking water.
In 1999 and 2000, the US Geological Survey checked agua samples in 30 states, finding 82 types of this class of pollutant (they looked for 95). The median amount was seven, with one stream containing 38. Among the most common were cholesterol, steroids, caffeine, a fire retardant, a disinfectant, and an insect repellant. A 1998 survey of 40 German waterways found 31 drugs and five metabolites. These and other studies in the US, Canada, and Europe have found antibiotics, hormones (mainly from birth control pills), antidepressants, codeine, high blood pressure meds, antacids, ibuprofen, musks, Darvon (a synthetic opioid), nicotine metabolites, blood lipid regulators, and the radioactive stuff you drink before getting X-rayed. No one has yet tested for illegal drugs, but given their rate of use, they and their metabolites have to be part of the mix.
So there's no doubt that our water supply is swimming with microscopic portions of chemicals from dandruff shampoo, Viagra, and pot. The question is what kind of effect this is having on us and on aquatic life. Scientists involved with the issue frankly admit that we just don't know. When it comes to humans, researchers have yet to study in-depth the effects of these micro-doses. As far as fish and other aquatic beasties are concerned, until recently no one thought to study the effects. Who would've thought, as a 2003 study found, that fish in Texas would have Prozac in their brains and livers? Beyond that, the studies that are done look at the effect of just one chemical, but in the real world these chemicals are occurring in combinations, resulting in cocktails with perhaps unknowable effects.
A hydrologist with the US Geological Survey, Sheila Murphy, summed up the problem as pointedly as anyone could: “It doesn't just go down the toilet and into Neverland.”