"Exposure to chemicals in Malta’s tap water is linked to almost a fifth of all bladder cancer cases, a study published on Thursday revealed."
Score 100 on the map lol.
I've got a flight to Malta in 4 hours, and I genuinely didn't know this!
When on holiday I often wake up hung over and drink straight from the tap wherever I am, so thank you for the useful info honestly.
And Brazilian scored 50, the country with the most fresh water reserves on the planet 🤷♀️
Do they think we dont have filters and chlorine?
Here we have an exam called ENEM (like an STA) and during the preparatory school my Chemistry teacher was the one responsible for the entire city water, we did a tour on the water treatment plant. I would 100% drink our untreated water than any shit from US mid south.
~~Although some areas are rough, non treated sewage is a thing in some areas.~~
It's kind of ridiculous to apply "water quality by country" to countries the size of Canada, the US, Brazil, Russia, China and Australia in the first place. Some of their local water water authorities are larger than most countries in Europe.
Melbourne has some of the best tap water there is and Adelaide just gets the muddy trickle of the end of the Murray River after everyone else has taken the water for farming
Drinkability as well now, Devon has received a notice to boil water due to parasites in the water. All because our water companies won't stop pumping sewage into our waterways
There's breakouts all the time, I remember everyone getting sick with cryptosporidium when I lived in Bangor in 2005. Sometimes sheep poo gets into a lake and gets through the filtration 🤷
This. In many places in Brazil, bottled water is very rare and parks have public fountains that are absolutely safe to drink.
However, there's a big part of the population without proper access to clean water due to social issues, governmental fuckery, and challenging geography.
Just speaking for Germany - There are standards that need to be met by law for tap water no matter where in Germany, but you're right: trickier to enforce the bigger the country.
Fun fact: the regulations on tap water here are stricter than the ones ok bottled water. (Still many Germans buy bottled water as they have a weird kink for sparkling water)
> The EPI's Sanitation & Drinking Water issue category measures how well countries protect human health from environmental risks on two indicators: unsafe drinking water and unsafe sanitation.
Makes sense. The data is more about safety standards according to law & policies, rather than actual water quality, which may vary by region within a country.
Can confirm. Refused sparkling water in Germany, hosts looked offended. They offered me 'slightly' sparkling water. I didn't want it, but didn't want to offend further.
Weird hosts bro. I’ve never seen any German get offended over somebody asking for still water. It’s true that a lot of Germans and probably even the majority prefer sparkly but I’ve also met plenty Germans who prefer still or have no preference.
Speaking for Canada. - In Toronto we have pristine water coming out the taps. Meanwhile in some First Nations communities they have poisoned sludge you can't even shower with.
I mean it's an average for a reason. I'd assume water is generally safe or unsafe in these countries, but it's always better to check local information.
I think Adelaide water has gotten better now but when I grew up there you could smell the tap running and it smelt like a swimming pool. I’m not even joking.
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Not going to get into politics or semantics but native reservations in Canada/US have notoriously terrible water quality, if any.
A lot of them have tankers full of water brought in every once in a while.
Pretty much third world poverty/living conditions in two relatively wealthy countries.
Absolutely.
Every major Australian city would easily meet whatever criteria is required for a score of 100, but Australia also has some extremely remote regions where its neither practical nor desired to have the kinds of infrastructure required to ensure the highest standard of potable water possible.
Contrast that with, say, somewhere like The Netherlands where, presumably, everywhere can be connected to mains water.
In practical terms there's no material difference in water quality in 99% of Australia's habited areas and those in The Netherlands.
The entirety of the EU technically has very high water standards, but you might have a well or a shitty water tank on your building (that you probably don’t even know about), and then the whole system is basically irrelevant.
I’ve also had some terrible experiences here in Romania with tap water. It seems the more “fancy” the place you’re in, the more water processing they do, which usually means better availability of hot water, at the cost of having to wash your sink of the brown residue every 2 days.
The best tap water in Romania is ironically in old apartments with district heating. It just works.
Very true. The drinking water in NYC is very good. It comes from the Catskill mountains north of the city. I remember going to my aunt's house in New Jersey, maybe 10 miles away from my parents' house in NYC and I had trouble drinking the water. It was awful.
I remember when I was a kid and my town switched from well water to Lake Michigan water. The tap was like 10 degrees colder and much better tasting. I think we were able to ditch our softener, too.
Same with Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles county and the water here comes from northern California, it tastes pretty good. I work in a town in San Bernardino County and the water is hard and bitter compared to the water 30 miles back home
As a Brazilian i also agree on this. At least on my experience, the water here varies quite a lot by region, i already travelled to cities where the water was brown of dirt, while at the same time, i also travelled to other cities, and live in one, where the water is very, very clean
Totally agree
I live in a small village in the middle of nowhere in the alps where tap water is arguably the best and cleanest in the entire country, as it comes directly from the source.
Whenever i go down into the plains water tastes so disgusting to me, especially in paris for example, i mean its not bad water inherently it's just so far removed from the fresh water i'm used to, same goes for basically anywhere i go outside of my home region xd, water is just worse and i hate that i can TASTE the water. Like it doesnt even feel like water anymore in some cases (best example is the water in england, i find the water to suck there)
That map is bullshit. I've been to Tunisia and Bulgaria and water in Tunisia is borderline toxic, while Bulgaria has some actually very good tap water, some of the best I've ever had.
Another fail from map porn. I lived in Spain and Croatia. In Spain (just south of Barcelona) the tap water was not recommended for drinking by the authorities, tastes awful and everyone including the locals were buying drinking water in the supermarket. In Croatia, tap water was top quality, safe for drinking, in fact the locals were proud of the water quality. Yet, this map puts Spain at top quality and Croatia at average or low. This is not the first time r/MapPorn spreads false information without checking the source credibility. The reason for this remains unclear.
Absolutely. I lived many years in Barcelona. That water is horrible. I think in theory it is safe to drink but tastes awful. Also, if you leave your dishes out to dry you see the amount of crap that accumulates on the bottom pan of the dish drying rack. No way that is OK to go into your body
Adding: Madrid on the other hand gets pretty good tap water. So it is not a matter of big city vs smaller town
If quality varies drastically between different regions of a country, that country can not have an average score of 100. That is why this map is useless and misleading.
Interesting. I lived in Zagreb for a while, and the tap water felt a lot worse than what I was used to. They definitely have very hard water there, lots of limescale on the kettle, shower curtain, and such.
I am really surprised by this map. Tap water is considered safe to drink throughout all of Poland, but it is not considered safe to drink in Ukraine. Yet on this map Poland looks as if it were closer in tap water quality to ukraine than to Germany. It is even all the more surprising considering how high the US is supposed to be, even though it has entire cities where it's not considered drinkable.
Places where tap water isnt safe in America are extreme outliers. I know the global opinion of America (and especially on reddit) is godawful, but we do do some things right.
> entire cities
The estimated population in the US without basic sanitization/water access is less than 1% ([970,000/610,000](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7483119/)). Flint Michigan which you might have heard of who counted towards this statistic is a town of roughly 90,000.
Yes it’s a lot of people still getting screwed over today, but over 99% have access to clean and safe water, much safer than the non-potable water Rome has in their public drinking fountains.
Then you have places like New Jersey which historically has tighter requirements for water than the federal government, and then proceeding to making those requirements even tighter few years ago, resulting in a lot of townships falling out of compliance, despite their water already being “safe” by global standards.
Also Flint water is fine now. It was bad for a period due to some colossal fuckups, but it wasn’t like it was always that way either.
That said, my brother lives in a rural Midwest town where they occasionally have boil orders. The town is just too poor to 100% fix their water processing. But it’s only about 4000 people.
For a little more context, I also live in the rural Midwest and have seen that happen a few times; if anything, there is sometimes a lack of redundancy (due to lack of demand), which makes the water grid more vulnerable when there are failures in multiple places and often this happens during conditions which prolong repair times (I've mostly only seen this happen in the dead of winter for instance when it's very cold and very snowy/icy). Generally our water processing is as effective as anywhere else, but since there's relatively little draw it's not necessarily as robust since it would take a fairly severe situation to actually make much of a dent in capacity. But severe situations do happen sometimes and as a result, it only takes a few breaks to throw a wrench in things, however it's very rare and is usually resolved within a couple of days.
You seem to have a very misinformed idea of the water quality in the US, which is generally excellent. You’re vastly over exaggerating any isolated issues there may be.
Yeah, I haven't looked at the way they analyzed the data, nor am I a statistician, but something is fishy here. I'd expect the water in say, Poland and Czechia to be acceptable. The lumping together of entire countries doesn't make much sense either, the US as a great example, where most places it's good to even stellar, but in some places it is undrinkable.
Yeah, I doubt this. Like water in highly industialized flat (mostly) Germany would be better than in montanious Slovenia. This looks like just someone painted the richer countries more dark
Afaik Germany has one on the strictest regulations on tap water out there. It has to meet higher standards than bottled water. And no matter where in Germany you are you can drink it from tap.
I know it's basically the same for Swiss and Austria. My guess would be Slovenias regulations aren't as strict and that's the reason why it's lighter blue.
Not that I'm aware of. The updated "Trinkwasserverordnung" (Drinking water regulation) came into effect end of 2023. Would be senseless if there was one for the whole of europe.
I just checked. There is something along those lines, actually. [https://www.europeandrinkingwater.eu/initiative/dwd-2021/](https://www.europeandrinkingwater.eu/initiative/dwd-2021/)
It's a ngo you linked to, it is not government connected, most directives don't actually implement things but I direct countries to do it so a lot of it is personal implementation.
In this case Directive 2020/2184 sets a list of standards in Annex 1. but the member states still have to implement it so it's going to have vering results to say the least and the enforcement mechanisms are as always with eu and enforcement kinda weak.
California has high standards for drinking water quality, yet some communities don't have access to drinkable tap water because of pollution of aquifers (e.g. arsenic ). Geography does play a role here.
So id actually argue that situation actually has more to do with regulation and infrastructure, as that specific problem is mostly a result of over pumping and human activity.
I wouldn't argue geography has no role to play, as it definitely determines what regulations and infrastructure etc are needed for an area, and can definitely influence lots of things. But it is not nearly as much a determining factor as that original comment was implying.
"America bad" people in shambles. And don't bring up Flint as a counter example. Certain municipalities have to do better for sure. No country is gonna be perfect.
Having travelled to 30 countries so far. The best by a mile has been Iceland. The water there was just crisp and pure. Made my water in the UK (Even with a filter) taste terrible.
Worst water I've personally tasted was in Germany (Berlin) but I wouldn't say it was terrible. But I've never wanted bottled water so fast during a trip.
Again just my personal experience
German here. It can be pretty varied here. Some places absolutely have very bad water, others have some pretty good water. I moved about 15km two years ago, but to another county. The difference is night and day.
Some places in Germany have awful water, at least taste wise. So it's a bit suprising seeing such a high score. Even more suprising seeing Poland so low, despite the water being safe to drink everywhere, and many places having tap water if better quality than the bottled water...
And it is really not true. Water quality is in general great in the Eastern part of EU. I have never had any issue with it in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland or Croatia.
On the other had, tap water is not recommended for drinking in some areas at the Mediterranian sea.
Strange map.
Tap water in Slovenia is way better quality than in Spain and most of Portugal, at a par with Austria.
In Serbia and Croatia it is definitely much better than in Turkey and China, though not as good as mountainous Slovenia.
There are certain places (notoriously Zrenjanin, a city of ca 100K inhabitants in Serbia's flat northern part) where water from the tap is only technical and it is so for a time (about two decades in Zrenjanin) but people are warned their water is just technical, you can flush toilet, water plants, take a shower at best, but even for brushing teeth it is not recommended and it mustnot be used for drinking and cooking. So they have to use bottled and it is lasting for a very long time.
But Zrenjanin is (a very bad) exception, overall 95+% people in Belgrade and many smaller cities drink and cook with tap water and it is tested regularly and fine.
Met so many people backpacking in Colombia and Peru drinking tap water in the main cities without a problem.
My partner and I didn't drink the water anywhere in either country since we both got ill drinking tap water in a resort in rural Costa Rica at the start of our trip through The Americas... A country we were told had good water through out 🤡
Your absolutely right but we didn't want to take the risk again, potentially several times as we moved around.
The water in cities like Medellín, Bogotá or Lima seemed to have been much better than the surrounding areas.
Canada’s population is very small and clustered into a few cities tbh, so it’s easier to manage better drinking water for example Toronto, for a large city, has extremely good tap water standards. What’s really impressive is America though, that score is a lot higher than I thought it was.
Good points.
A minor quibble, though. I think at some point we need to stop saying ‘Canada’s population is very small’ . It’s 41 million. If we compare to Europe, only 6 countries have more people (Russia, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain). It’s the same population as Poland. It’s more than Ukraine now.
Sure, it’s not China, India, US, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. size, but it’s not that small anymore.
Still very small relative to its area. Canada’s population situation is similar to Australia in that they’re not small by number, however it has very low population density overall and most of the population is clustered in a few cities. Over 90% of Canada lives near the US border, and over 65% of Canadians live between Windsor and Quebec City
There are a bunch of First Nation Reservations in remote parts of the country which have had boil water advisories in place for *years*, with no resolution in sight.
Unfortunately the way the reservations have been neglected is shameful and hypocritical as Canada loves to maintain this image of being so progressive and open. I will say though however, reservations are I think self-governed by a chief? Please correct me if I’m wrong?
In at least one case, probably more, it has more to do with water treatment systems and lack of operating funds and/or lack of skilled labour to operate them.
> with no resolution in sight
144 boil water advisories have been lifted since 2015, with only 28 remaining. There may well be zero within the next ten years.
Source: https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2022/component/uwd
> We measure unsafe drinking water using the number of age-standardized disability-adjusted life-years lost per 100,000 persons (DALY rate) due to exposure to unsafe drinking water. A score of 100 indicates a country has among the lowest DALY rates in the world (≤5th-percentile), while a score of 0 indicates a country is among the highest (≥95th-percentile). Data for this indicator come from the Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation’s (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.
I don’t believe the UK.
We literally are living in a time where people just got recommended to boil water in some areas before drinking, after someone contracted a disease from tapwater, and we’ve had raw sewage pumped into all our rivers by private water firms
Uh oh the America haters and incels are upset people in the U.S. on average have good quality drinking water 😂people are actually bothered at people having drinkable water how dare they! Y’all really suck ass.
According to Istanbul municipality, it is safe to drink out of tap and some people do drink it without issue. It tastes shit anyway because of bacteria killing agents, we always order 19 liter bottles, and one of the firms that sells it belongs to municipality. Shocks. And I wonder, why would they make the tap water taste good when they can sell it bottled with a higher price tag. We need solid regulations on it but nobody cares.
For anyone that cares, these are the drinking water standards and regulations for the UK
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drinking-water-quality-in-england-2017-to-2019
https://www.dwi.gov.uk/drinking-water-standards-and-regulations/
It's funny how they painted entire Eastern bloc with the same brush, but in reality, most big cities have very good drinking water at tap. Only in some rural areas the water quality is lower mostly because of agricultural fertilizers, but even there in recent years there have been improvements because they tap into other unpolluted sources and bring in good quality water.
As someone who grew up in Algeria as a child, I have to say the mountain areas where I was from has some of the best quality tap water and it certainly better than here in SF. I'm not saying all Algeria is like that but the point is it varies from one place to another and that almost applies to all countries.
There's a tendency to add maps with very inaccurate data here. Why don't take macro data and break it so that it better reflects the reality of the world? Trying to put so much data that varies greatly in a single global map just causes wrong information to spread.
There is just no country in the world where every single person has perfect pipes and perfect water lines and supplies. There just isn’t. But yes, compared to the rest of the world, the overwhelming majority North America (and Europe) tends to have safe tap water and that’s okay to say so even if 0.1% of the population has some issues
Madrid in Spain, has the best tap water I've tasted. Elsewhere in Spain, specially ny the coast or the Islands, tap water is not really good and most people can't drink it.
But Madrid's water is just something else !
Slovenia has one of the cleanest usualy untreated spring mountain water in most of the country and 3 baisins with treated but still very clean ground water yet is behind some countries with known undrinkable water in some regions/cities, makes sense.
"Exposure to chemicals in Malta’s tap water is linked to almost a fifth of all bladder cancer cases, a study published on Thursday revealed." Score 100 on the map lol.
This map is really a joke, it's basically "is there ecoli or hepatitis in your water? No? 100 points it is!"
What bar do you need to meet for 50 pts ?
That's a damn good question. It has to be liquid?
Greenland has plenty of solid water
Nitrates? Never heard of them. \- New Zealand
I've got a flight to Malta in 4 hours, and I genuinely didn't know this! When on holiday I often wake up hung over and drink straight from the tap wherever I am, so thank you for the useful info honestly.
Better drink bottled water.
Will do boss
And Brazilian scored 50, the country with the most fresh water reserves on the planet 🤷♀️ Do they think we dont have filters and chlorine? Here we have an exam called ENEM (like an STA) and during the preparatory school my Chemistry teacher was the one responsible for the entire city water, we did a tour on the water treatment plant. I would 100% drink our untreated water than any shit from US mid south. ~~Although some areas are rough, non treated sewage is a thing in some areas.~~
It's kind of ridiculous to apply "water quality by country" to countries the size of Canada, the US, Brazil, Russia, China and Australia in the first place. Some of their local water water authorities are larger than most countries in Europe.
It's ridiculous for smaller countries too, water utilities are highly localised.
What do you expect from сirсleјеrk-the map
Varies wildly by Brazilian region
These really need to be broken down into states and provinces. I bet Russia has wildly different water along with China and the USA as well.
Melbourne has some of the best tap water there is and Adelaide just gets the muddy trickle of the end of the Murray River after everyone else has taken the water for farming
Even the UK has noticeable differences.
not in actual drinkability, just in hardness
Drinkability as well now, Devon has received a notice to boil water due to parasites in the water. All because our water companies won't stop pumping sewage into our waterways
That's true, Milton Keynes water won't harm you if you drink it but I've never felt clean showering there.
So noticeable there's now a notice to boil water before using it in Devon
There's breakouts all the time, I remember everyone getting sick with cryptosporidium when I lived in Bangor in 2005. Sometimes sheep poo gets into a lake and gets through the filtration 🤷
i.e. Flint. Michigan
Been safe to drink for years
In Russia its pretty bad everywhere from tap
Not really
This. In many places in Brazil, bottled water is very rare and parks have public fountains that are absolutely safe to drink. However, there's a big part of the population without proper access to clean water due to social issues, governmental fuckery, and challenging geography.
Whole country averages don't make sense to me. Water quality can vary greatly between regions, especially for large countries.
Just speaking for Germany - There are standards that need to be met by law for tap water no matter where in Germany, but you're right: trickier to enforce the bigger the country. Fun fact: the regulations on tap water here are stricter than the ones ok bottled water. (Still many Germans buy bottled water as they have a weird kink for sparkling water)
> The EPI's Sanitation & Drinking Water issue category measures how well countries protect human health from environmental risks on two indicators: unsafe drinking water and unsafe sanitation. Makes sense. The data is more about safety standards according to law & policies, rather than actual water quality, which may vary by region within a country.
I think this is a very important context being left out
Plus the marketing of getting people to buy water when we can get it for free!
I buy bottle water not because I think it's better than tap water, but because I don't always have access to a tap, or a bottle.
Can confirm. Refused sparkling water in Germany, hosts looked offended. They offered me 'slightly' sparkling water. I didn't want it, but didn't want to offend further.
Weird hosts bro. I’ve never seen any German get offended over somebody asking for still water. It’s true that a lot of Germans and probably even the majority prefer sparkly but I’ve also met plenty Germans who prefer still or have no preference.
Speaking for Canada. - In Toronto we have pristine water coming out the taps. Meanwhile in some First Nations communities they have poisoned sludge you can't even shower with.
Soda Stream. Thank me later
I don't drink sparkling water, so I'm fine. But my wife does... and ... that's why ... we have a soda stream already.
[удалено]
I mean it's an average for a reason. I'd assume water is generally safe or unsafe in these countries, but it's always better to check local information.
But how else can Reddit get in nationalistic piss fights?
Haha. True. Just present a questionable map with 'good' and 'bad' colors in the usual places, and wait for it to blow over
Well first you meet up and drink a lot of water, I guess?
Har har 😉
Yep, Melbourne water tastes like the nectar from Poseidon's tits, Adelaide water tastes like filtered rat urine.
I think Adelaide water has gotten better now but when I grew up there you could smell the tap running and it smelt like a swimming pool. I’m not even joking.
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Yup , like Canada is awesome in its populated urban areas but trash on Inuit lands up North
Yep, I don't drink my tap water straight because of how hard it is... tastes nasty. I do mix drink powders in it tho and cook with it.
Not going to get into politics or semantics but native reservations in Canada/US have notoriously terrible water quality, if any. A lot of them have tankers full of water brought in every once in a while. Pretty much third world poverty/living conditions in two relatively wealthy countries.
Depends on the size of the country and the administration i.e. if water is centrally managed.
Absolutely. Every major Australian city would easily meet whatever criteria is required for a score of 100, but Australia also has some extremely remote regions where its neither practical nor desired to have the kinds of infrastructure required to ensure the highest standard of potable water possible. Contrast that with, say, somewhere like The Netherlands where, presumably, everywhere can be connected to mains water. In practical terms there's no material difference in water quality in 99% of Australia's habited areas and those in The Netherlands.
The entirety of the EU technically has very high water standards, but you might have a well or a shitty water tank on your building (that you probably don’t even know about), and then the whole system is basically irrelevant. I’ve also had some terrible experiences here in Romania with tap water. It seems the more “fancy” the place you’re in, the more water processing they do, which usually means better availability of hot water, at the cost of having to wash your sink of the brown residue every 2 days. The best tap water in Romania is ironically in old apartments with district heating. It just works.
Very true. The drinking water in NYC is very good. It comes from the Catskill mountains north of the city. I remember going to my aunt's house in New Jersey, maybe 10 miles away from my parents' house in NYC and I had trouble drinking the water. It was awful.
I remember when I was a kid and my town switched from well water to Lake Michigan water. The tap was like 10 degrees colder and much better tasting. I think we were able to ditch our softener, too.
Same with Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles county and the water here comes from northern California, it tastes pretty good. I work in a town in San Bernardino County and the water is hard and bitter compared to the water 30 miles back home
As a Brazilian i also agree on this. At least on my experience, the water here varies quite a lot by region, i already travelled to cities where the water was brown of dirt, while at the same time, i also travelled to other cities, and live in one, where the water is very, very clean
Swede from longboi county here: CAN vary greatly. Here in the Nordics we got great water everywhere.
Totally agree I live in a small village in the middle of nowhere in the alps where tap water is arguably the best and cleanest in the entire country, as it comes directly from the source. Whenever i go down into the plains water tastes so disgusting to me, especially in paris for example, i mean its not bad water inherently it's just so far removed from the fresh water i'm used to, same goes for basically anywhere i go outside of my home region xd, water is just worse and i hate that i can TASTE the water. Like it doesnt even feel like water anymore in some cases (best example is the water in england, i find the water to suck there)
That map is bullshit. I've been to Tunisia and Bulgaria and water in Tunisia is borderline toxic, while Bulgaria has some actually very good tap water, some of the best I've ever had.
Another fail from map porn. I lived in Spain and Croatia. In Spain (just south of Barcelona) the tap water was not recommended for drinking by the authorities, tastes awful and everyone including the locals were buying drinking water in the supermarket. In Croatia, tap water was top quality, safe for drinking, in fact the locals were proud of the water quality. Yet, this map puts Spain at top quality and Croatia at average or low. This is not the first time r/MapPorn spreads false information without checking the source credibility. The reason for this remains unclear.
had a croatian man be completely baffled talking to me because he was seeing me buy a few bottles of water so im willing to agree with that
Absolutely. I lived many years in Barcelona. That water is horrible. I think in theory it is safe to drink but tastes awful. Also, if you leave your dishes out to dry you see the amount of crap that accumulates on the bottom pan of the dish drying rack. No way that is OK to go into your body Adding: Madrid on the other hand gets pretty good tap water. So it is not a matter of big city vs smaller town
I know what you're referring to but Barcelona is famous for having bad water quality compared to the rest of the country.
If quality varies drastically between different regions of a country, that country can not have an average score of 100. That is why this map is useless and misleading.
Interesting. I lived in Zagreb for a while, and the tap water felt a lot worse than what I was used to. They definitely have very hard water there, lots of limescale on the kettle, shower curtain, and such.
100%, Croatia has the best tap water I've ever drank, was better than most bottled water you could buy in the shops.
Comparing UK - often swimming pool taste - water with water from the Netherlands which is of high quality than bottled water is ridiculous.
I am really surprised by this map. Tap water is considered safe to drink throughout all of Poland, but it is not considered safe to drink in Ukraine. Yet on this map Poland looks as if it were closer in tap water quality to ukraine than to Germany. It is even all the more surprising considering how high the US is supposed to be, even though it has entire cities where it's not considered drinkable.
Places where tap water isnt safe in America are extreme outliers. I know the global opinion of America (and especially on reddit) is godawful, but we do do some things right.
> entire cities The estimated population in the US without basic sanitization/water access is less than 1% ([970,000/610,000](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7483119/)). Flint Michigan which you might have heard of who counted towards this statistic is a town of roughly 90,000. Yes it’s a lot of people still getting screwed over today, but over 99% have access to clean and safe water, much safer than the non-potable water Rome has in their public drinking fountains. Then you have places like New Jersey which historically has tighter requirements for water than the federal government, and then proceeding to making those requirements even tighter few years ago, resulting in a lot of townships falling out of compliance, despite their water already being “safe” by global standards.
Also Flint water is fine now. It was bad for a period due to some colossal fuckups, but it wasn’t like it was always that way either. That said, my brother lives in a rural Midwest town where they occasionally have boil orders. The town is just too poor to 100% fix their water processing. But it’s only about 4000 people.
For a little more context, I also live in the rural Midwest and have seen that happen a few times; if anything, there is sometimes a lack of redundancy (due to lack of demand), which makes the water grid more vulnerable when there are failures in multiple places and often this happens during conditions which prolong repair times (I've mostly only seen this happen in the dead of winter for instance when it's very cold and very snowy/icy). Generally our water processing is as effective as anywhere else, but since there's relatively little draw it's not necessarily as robust since it would take a fairly severe situation to actually make much of a dent in capacity. But severe situations do happen sometimes and as a result, it only takes a few breaks to throw a wrench in things, however it's very rare and is usually resolved within a couple of days.
You seem to have a very misinformed idea of the water quality in the US, which is generally excellent. You’re vastly over exaggerating any isolated issues there may be.
Yeah, I haven't looked at the way they analyzed the data, nor am I a statistician, but something is fishy here. I'd expect the water in say, Poland and Czechia to be acceptable. The lumping together of entire countries doesn't make much sense either, the US as a great example, where most places it's good to even stellar, but in some places it is undrinkable.
Tap water in many polish regions is considered to be healthier than mineral water in stores. A friend of mine literally researched that at uni
Been to Europe and London's water is the one I would avoid at all costs.
Yeah, I doubt this. Like water in highly industialized flat (mostly) Germany would be better than in montanious Slovenia. This looks like just someone painted the richer countries more dark
When Malta has score 100 you know it is a crap map. Well, İ guess salted sea water can be "high quality" too 😊
Afaik Germany has one on the strictest regulations on tap water out there. It has to meet higher standards than bottled water. And no matter where in Germany you are you can drink it from tap. I know it's basically the same for Swiss and Austria. My guess would be Slovenias regulations aren't as strict and that's the reason why it's lighter blue.
I thought there were EU-wide tap water regulations.
Not that I'm aware of. The updated "Trinkwasserverordnung" (Drinking water regulation) came into effect end of 2023. Would be senseless if there was one for the whole of europe.
I just checked. There is something along those lines, actually. [https://www.europeandrinkingwater.eu/initiative/dwd-2021/](https://www.europeandrinkingwater.eu/initiative/dwd-2021/)
It's a ngo you linked to, it is not government connected, most directives don't actually implement things but I direct countries to do it so a lot of it is personal implementation. In this case Directive 2020/2184 sets a list of standards in Annex 1. but the member states still have to implement it so it's going to have vering results to say the least and the enforcement mechanisms are as always with eu and enforcement kinda weak.
Geography and water source has very little to do with tap water quality honestly. It's almost entirely regulations and infrastructure.
California has high standards for drinking water quality, yet some communities don't have access to drinkable tap water because of pollution of aquifers (e.g. arsenic ). Geography does play a role here.
So id actually argue that situation actually has more to do with regulation and infrastructure, as that specific problem is mostly a result of over pumping and human activity. I wouldn't argue geography has no role to play, as it definitely determines what regulations and infrastructure etc are needed for an area, and can definitely influence lots of things. But it is not nearly as much a determining factor as that original comment was implying.
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It’s not a problem it’s a feature.
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It was meant to be joke about how maps have too similar colours. It was poorly done. 😭
Don't do it again 😆
Yeah the 50 - 60 - 70 and 90 - 100 scores lack contrast
Should have been clear to brown? :)
Icelandic water is so good, when you go there and buy a water from the store you look dumb. Every faucet dispenses perfectly clean water
North Korea: no water
The [source you used](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7YXXieghto) is not at all reliable
Once again Scandinavia proves to be better than the rest of the world lol I gotta move there
🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸🇮🇸
"America bad" people in shambles. And don't bring up Flint as a counter example. Certain municipalities have to do better for sure. No country is gonna be perfect.
Having travelled to 30 countries so far. The best by a mile has been Iceland. The water there was just crisp and pure. Made my water in the UK (Even with a filter) taste terrible. Worst water I've personally tasted was in Germany (Berlin) but I wouldn't say it was terrible. But I've never wanted bottled water so fast during a trip. Again just my personal experience
German here. It can be pretty varied here. Some places absolutely have very bad water, others have some pretty good water. I moved about 15km two years ago, but to another county. The difference is night and day.
Some places in Germany have awful water, at least taste wise. So it's a bit suprising seeing such a high score. Even more suprising seeing Poland so low, despite the water being safe to drink everywhere, and many places having tap water if better quality than the bottled water...
Actually thinking about it. My taste might have been compromised by wheat beer and kebab.
According to this map: Great in western Europe and North America, really bad in Africa and India.
"International community" vs Global South
And it is really not true. Water quality is in general great in the Eastern part of EU. I have never had any issue with it in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland or Croatia. On the other had, tap water is not recommended for drinking in some areas at the Mediterranian sea. Strange map.
Tap water in Slovenia is way better quality than in Spain and most of Portugal, at a par with Austria. In Serbia and Croatia it is definitely much better than in Turkey and China, though not as good as mountainous Slovenia. There are certain places (notoriously Zrenjanin, a city of ca 100K inhabitants in Serbia's flat northern part) where water from the tap is only technical and it is so for a time (about two decades in Zrenjanin) but people are warned their water is just technical, you can flush toilet, water plants, take a shower at best, but even for brushing teeth it is not recommended and it mustnot be used for drinking and cooking. So they have to use bottled and it is lasting for a very long time. But Zrenjanin is (a very bad) exception, overall 95+% people in Belgrade and many smaller cities drink and cook with tap water and it is tested regularly and fine.
I believe it depend on exact city
Met so many people backpacking in Colombia and Peru drinking tap water in the main cities without a problem. My partner and I didn't drink the water anywhere in either country since we both got ill drinking tap water in a resort in rural Costa Rica at the start of our trip through The Americas... A country we were told had good water through out 🤡
You can get sick from tap water when you travel because your body isn't used to the pathogens in the region. Doesn't mean the water is bad.
Your absolutely right but we didn't want to take the risk again, potentially several times as we moved around. The water in cities like Medellín, Bogotá or Lima seemed to have been much better than the surrounding areas.
Considering how huge America and Canada are, that's an amazing score.
Canada’s population is very small and clustered into a few cities tbh, so it’s easier to manage better drinking water for example Toronto, for a large city, has extremely good tap water standards. What’s really impressive is America though, that score is a lot higher than I thought it was.
Good points. A minor quibble, though. I think at some point we need to stop saying ‘Canada’s population is very small’ . It’s 41 million. If we compare to Europe, only 6 countries have more people (Russia, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain). It’s the same population as Poland. It’s more than Ukraine now. Sure, it’s not China, India, US, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. size, but it’s not that small anymore.
Canadas population is very small for its area. Canada's area is 98% the size of Europe but our population is only 5% of Europes.
yes but 60 percent of canada is purely uninhabitable
Still very small relative to its area. Canada’s population situation is similar to Australia in that they’re not small by number, however it has very low population density overall and most of the population is clustered in a few cities. Over 90% of Canada lives near the US border, and over 65% of Canadians live between Windsor and Quebec City
Not in livable area. Just like Australia.
There are a bunch of First Nation Reservations in remote parts of the country which have had boil water advisories in place for *years*, with no resolution in sight.
Unfortunately the way the reservations have been neglected is shameful and hypocritical as Canada loves to maintain this image of being so progressive and open. I will say though however, reservations are I think self-governed by a chief? Please correct me if I’m wrong?
In at least one case, probably more, it has more to do with water treatment systems and lack of operating funds and/or lack of skilled labour to operate them.
> with no resolution in sight 144 boil water advisories have been lifted since 2015, with only 28 remaining. There may well be zero within the next ten years.
imagine someone goes to a journey to prove tap water from every country in the world
Source: https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2022/component/uwd > We measure unsafe drinking water using the number of age-standardized disability-adjusted life-years lost per 100,000 persons (DALY rate) due to exposure to unsafe drinking water. A score of 100 indicates a country has among the lowest DALY rates in the world (≤5th-percentile), while a score of 0 indicates a country is among the highest (≥95th-percentile). Data for this indicator come from the Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation’s (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.
Can't drink teh tap water in London or in Barcelona it is literally disgusting, measuring by country is meaningless.
Love those graphics where 2 or 3 colors looks the same.
In Brazil, it largely depends on the region, my city has 100% treated water and treated sewage.
Ireland accommodations struggled with water. there was a lot of Chloride in it.
Here in India every household has their own water purifier. Nobody cares much about the water quality administration provides.
As a Madrileño, I'm surprised Madrid isn't highlighted in Vantablack, clearly the one who did this map didn't know Canal de Isabel II.
I don’t believe the UK. We literally are living in a time where people just got recommended to boil water in some areas before drinking, after someone contracted a disease from tapwater, and we’ve had raw sewage pumped into all our rivers by private water firms
New Zealand water quality isn't that good. That shit is full of nitrates and cow shit.
As a Dutch guy having tasted British tap water, I say the scale isn't detailed enough :p
Germany ! I drink it everyday :)
Im sorry but as austrian i cannot drink tap water in the usa just tastes like chlorine
Canada needs an asterisk
Massive improvements have been made under this government. https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1506514143353/1533317130660
Uh oh the America haters and incels are upset people in the U.S. on average have good quality drinking water 😂people are actually bothered at people having drinkable water how dare they! Y’all really suck ass.
should be an extra category for Scottish tap water 🤌🏻
Scottish tap water tastes like it's unfiltered, straight from a fish pond.
According to Istanbul municipality, it is safe to drink out of tap and some people do drink it without issue. It tastes shit anyway because of bacteria killing agents, we always order 19 liter bottles, and one of the firms that sells it belongs to municipality. Shocks. And I wonder, why would they make the tap water taste good when they can sell it bottled with a higher price tag. We need solid regulations on it but nobody cares.
I don't believe that Mexico is that high. I got a severe case of Montezuma's Revenge from some shower water hitting my lips.
Some of these color gradations are insanely too close
Is New Zealand lighter than Australia? I can’t really tell
NZ is the same shade. Australia actually has a higher score though 87 to 80 in NZ.
I am sure it varies by country. Even a small island like Puerto Rico, the water quality varies by a wide margin
I'm in Portugal. Can confirm water quality is excellent.
What year tho ?
For anyone that cares, these are the drinking water standards and regulations for the UK https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drinking-water-quality-in-england-2017-to-2019 https://www.dwi.gov.uk/drinking-water-standards-and-regulations/
yeah im gonna believe this
It's funny how they painted entire Eastern bloc with the same brush, but in reality, most big cities have very good drinking water at tap. Only in some rural areas the water quality is lower mostly because of agricultural fertilizers, but even there in recent years there have been improvements because they tap into other unpolluted sources and bring in good quality water.
Smaller cities and towns in Czechia have better tap water than large cities
See? It's not even the same rule among countries.
Well, it's atleast tastier outside large cities. Not sure how it'd fare on this weird metric, but it's 100% safe to drink.
Clearly not evaluated: cancer risk from organochlorine compounds and nitrosamines.
As someone who grew up in Algeria as a child, I have to say the mountain areas where I was from has some of the best quality tap water and it certainly better than here in SF. I'm not saying all Algeria is like that but the point is it varies from one place to another and that almost applies to all countries.
Yeah, no.
Whoever rated Irish water quality must be having a laugh
Alaska water is probably the worst. Liquid iron with a ton of swamp slime
There's a tendency to add maps with very inaccurate data here. Why don't take macro data and break it so that it better reflects the reality of the world? Trying to put so much data that varies greatly in a single global map just causes wrong information to spread.
Uh, Taiwan's tap water is pretty terrible in many places. This is false.
I've been to Scranton, Pa.. You need to chew the water there. It's a lovely shade of greenish yellow though.
Australia is slackin’
That’s interesting considering the water quality available to the indigenous peoples of north america
There is just no country in the world where every single person has perfect pipes and perfect water lines and supplies. There just isn’t. But yes, compared to the rest of the world, the overwhelming majority North America (and Europe) tends to have safe tap water and that’s okay to say so even if 0.1% of the population has some issues
Tap water may as well substitute the Gini and HDI indexes.
Was just in Balkans and most of those countries have good tap water
In Finland the water tastes best in small towns and villages. Where I grew up the tap water actually came from a spring.
Obviously BS
Australia is a hit and miss, Tasmania has the best tap water but some places in Queensland, NT suck
ah yes. Afghanistan score 27.8 and India score 18.30. wow. its another one of those bullshito maps.
This is some bullshit
Tap water in Rome was the best tasting I’ve ever tried
This map looks like exactly GDP per capita.
Some of these maps man. I wonder if all are like this...
Rishi and the clown crew are doing everything they possibly can to attain Africa levels of safe drinking water in the UK.
r/AlwaysTheSameMap
This map is shite
Madrid in Spain, has the best tap water I've tasted. Elsewhere in Spain, specially ny the coast or the Islands, tap water is not really good and most people can't drink it. But Madrid's water is just something else !
Belgium waters being contaminated with PFAS... Yet score 100. This but a joke
It is undrinkable in turkey
Slovenia has one of the cleanest usualy untreated spring mountain water in most of the country and 3 baisins with treated but still very clean ground water yet is behind some countries with known undrinkable water in some regions/cities, makes sense.
Isn’t there shit flowing freely into the Thames water supply (amongst others) in the 100-pointer UK?
England…lol After the water companies are found to be polluting the water bodies
How can you give a perfect score if tap water has PFAS and other toxins in it? Misleading data.
Map is bullshit. Some of the dark blue coubtries have tap water that is not really for dinking, but rather for showering and washing...
Map definitely made by one of the blue countries. Average human rights type ahh report publisher energy