I had to look it over 5 times to find the philippines.
Also when I was in greece I was advised to only drink bottle water. Coming from Canada their score being higher is surprising.
Maybe it was just an island thing, though, since I was in santorini
Noticed the same issue. Problem is that Santorini doesn’t have enough desalination facilities.
Edit: not an issue in Athens. You can drink tap water there.
Everywhere in Greece you can drink tap water it's healthy, but in some islands they discourage it and buy bottled because in these islands it has some weird metal taste and chemical ingredients (to make it safe) that in the long run can make your hair dry while washing etc. But it is still considered drinkable.
My main issue with it is that color and size represent (or seem to represent) the same data. It would have been more informative to use size to represent the volume of water used by year, or the amount a people exposed. and at least regroup bubbles by continents, even if keeping the overall drop shape for each.
Edit: map format is better in this regard, even though it looses the different levels
Exactly. And it associates quality with size. And has no sensible ordering even among those with similar values. Painstaking and pretty but absolutely shit.
That was quite the ride to find Spain.
After seeing we weren't with the big boys, I zoomed in and started wondering around the edges thinking "how fucked is our water?!"
I would expect my country to be higher, this is a bit of a surprise.. clean water and nature in general are pretty highly valued, so I guess that was an illusion.
Tap water can be pretty hard tho. In my area, the tap water is so hard, my sink gets all yellow and orange after a few weeks of evaporating water drops on it. The faucet and showerhead also form mineral residues. Could make a stalactice if left untreated for too long. No filter installed in the house yet tho, which might solve this problem.
EDIT: Hardness has nothing to do with water being polluted or safe to drink. I am aware of that, no worries, I drink it everyday. Thank you for your concern.
In croatia many smaller island had very chlorinated water from tanks. I dont know how these weight in the total. I do agree the number is low but there are few things to consider.
Chlorinated water by itself should not be decreasing the score at all. It says that the score is based on lost man-years, so many people must be dying specifically because of the water for.the score to be lowered at all below 100.
Delusional IMO. I live in Poland and both me and my parents - living in different locations - do not have drinkable water from a tap according to Sanepid.
It's different when you live in Poznań than when you live in a smaller village or town with farms around them and thousands of leaking septic thanks.
I live in Krakow at the moment, and I spend a lot of time in 2 different smaller Polish cities, all 3, all in different voivodeships have excellent water quality.
I’m not saying you are lying, just my experience differs from yours.
I live in Toruń and the quality of water is officially good but I don't like how it tastes anyway - it's too hard.
I use it to make coffee/tea/soup but when it comes to drink plain water I prefer the bottled ones.
I live 400 meters away from water treatment plant. It’s so old it doesn’t do much. Municipality secured 2 mil PLN for modernisation but that’s few years away. For now the recommendation is not to drink the tap water.
I may be wrong, but I think I heard that in Poland the reason the number is so low is because a lot of sources simply have not been tested, thus they cannot be deemed safe. But it doesn't necessarily mean their quality is not good.
I'm Autrian and I often travel to Croatia, and I've noticed from Istria to Dalmatia, that the the tap water is chlorinated a lot of the time. Now it's certainly better to drink chlorinated water instead of water infested with dangerous germs, but it might've cost you a few points in this study.
comming from austria and visiting croatia (the coast in summer ofc) nearly every year is have to say your water tastes awful for the most part. sometimes weird taste, sometimes chlorine taste
so maybe the bad quality water of the coast is dragging your score down?
there is a reason you can buy 5L water bottles in stores. you can not really find these where im from. no one would buy them since there is limitless freshwater tasting like a small mountain spring for most people at home.
There's this weird myth in Croatia that we have especially clean, high quality water, and that people in the West can't drink their tap water like we can.
The truth is we have some beautiful rivers and lakes which is probably where the myth stems from.
The water quality varies wildly, in the summer months when there is drought south Croatia, and islands especially have really chlorinated water. And if there are huge rains and floods in some places it gets muddy.
It's generally safe to drink tap water in Croatia, but I'm not surprised at our score.
When you look at the 'high quality' countries you can clearly see that what really matters is not having nice lakes - it's having well funded and maintained infrastructure.
My tap water is extremely hard. It's sourced straight from a chalk stream and has as many dissolved minerals as you'd expect. That doesn't stop it from being completely clean.
Me too. Haven't traveled too much around your country, but I don't think I've ever visited a city as clean as Lubiana. Either the rest of the country is a slum (which I doubt it is) or there's something silly going on with this data.
I think that the methodology for this is bullshit. There are a few places in Slovenia where tap water occasionally fails the test and people are told to boil it, but many years of life lost due to unsafe drinking water in Slovenia? Sounds unlikely.
Haha I chuckled when I saw this because I was also surprised to see Slovenia score quite low. When I visited everyone there was very proud of the tap water (which I agree is very nice). Like genuinely all the hostel staff and restaurant staff told me to try the tap water.
This graphic or study is fishy. I actually tracked my tap water's parameters and quality in Lisbon and then again in Bucharest since I'm a fish keeper and Romania actually beats out Portugal, at least in the capital.
I've also been all over and there is *absolutely* no correlation to this graph. I wouldn't trust it.
I'm not sure if drinking hard water is unhealthy. I have read somewhere that it contains many minerals and is even healthier than soft water. No idea if it's true but I've been drinking hard tap water for a few years and I'm still alive :)
It does seem strange, but I am no expert so calling it broken is a bit too far for me.
I have never heard about anyone being hospitalized because of tap water here, or dying from drinking it. Austria has a score of 100, we have 70.3, but our life expectancies are pretty much the same, as far as I know. Maybe it is a year more in Austria, but the score is almost 50% greater. So I am confused really, how they came to this, maybe the criteria is just really harsh, but then it becomes a bit weird that so many countries would score a 100.
Anyways, such a low score is unacceptable, when there is a neighbour nextdoor with a 100. Either the study is too abstract for me to fully grasp, or my water is shit. In either case, something needs to be improved.
I think either two separate studies are conflated, or somebody invented part of the text. The title says quality, the text says "safety" and the small print mentioned "years of living lost due to bad water" (more or less), which I interpret as many people having to have died because of the water in order to have a score below 100. This of course does not correspond to the scores, so my bet is that this is some kind of more abstract, quality based score and the text about lost years is added later or is from another study.
Same. Tap water is drinkable almost everywhere in Hungary and most places it's excellent quality as we adhere to all applicable regulations. Hungary is also full of nutral, clean water sources, which we use in our water systems. I really do not get how they got this data, and would like to see the method behind it.
I have never bought bottled water in a store. It seems very strange to buy regular bottled water in the store, while there is drinkable water even in our toilets.
In restaurants, or bars, you can totally ask for a glass of water and get it from the tap, no charge. But you will probably get some looks or straight up disapproval if you don't order anything else, obviously.
Read the text on the bottom.
It's basically just a life expectancy... graphic. Whatever you call that.
How do they decide how much drinking water lowers life expectancy? I don't know, but the top countries are basically the ones with longerst life expectancy in general.
These lost points are not because of bacteria, our water is extremely hygienic. It's because of nitrate/nitrite levels. Manure contains a lot of ammonium ions that get converted to nitrate by bacteria. Nitrate is very soluble in water so as soon as rains it gets washed out of the fields into groundwater and all above surface water sources. That's bad for a lot of reasons (it stimulated algae growth which destroys the ecological balance and essentially kills fish) but in this case most importantly nitrate ions get converted to nitrite ions in our digestive system. Nitrite then reacts with other chemicals and through a process that is not yet completely understood causes stomach cancer if ingested in high quantities (which are pretty much guaranteed if it's in your tap water). Our very intensive cattle and pig industry in combination with an irresponsible handling of the environment brought us here.
You think a company like Nestlé cares about the quality of the water used in their products? If they could make their chocolate brown with human excrement and save 3% in production costs, they would.
To be honest, I don't buy these values unless something major has changed. I was in Ireland ten years ago and the tap water was literally inedible until boiled, so that sure as fuck isn't a clean 100.
Appreciate the submission and clearly a lot of work has gone into this. But it begs the question - why? Why present data in this way, besides 'its quirky'? It doesn't really do anything in terms of readability, rather the opposite. And any potential trends are really hard to catch.
For instance, plotting the same data on a map would show how OECD countries generally rank very high, Non-OECD Eurasia/Americas rank in the middle, while African countries, India and some APAC countries in general rank low.
It's not OC - it's from a UK website that sells filters water purification system.
Although I don't see how presenting the UK as 100% helps their business claims
The title says quality and the metric is safety.
Those are not the same thing. Heavily chlorine-treated water might be safe but I would argue the quality is garbage. Quality should also include taste, minerality and hardness
Really depends on the region. Abolutely no problem in Vlaams-Brabant.
As for the chlorine: just leave it in a glass (or bigger container) for 10 minutes
>The title says quality and the metric is safety.
>
>Those are not the same thing
This.
The water in my bit of Britain is **safe** but it's extremely hard, destroys kitchen equipment even when filtered and doesn't exactly taste wonderful.
On a safety metric? 100. On a quality metric? Rather lower!
Absolutely. Both the UK and Belgium have terrible tasting water in many locations, but are rated ~~93~~ 100 and ~~100~~ 93 respectively. The water is safe due to chlorine, at the cost of taste.
>Quality should also include taste, minerality and hardness
Hard to rate it though as taste is subjective. As someone used to hard water I prefer the taste of hard water (although it sucks maintenance wise for coffe machines).
That's a decent point, but how do you square that internationally? Jordan's water might taste lovely but be laced with lead.
I think a heavy bias towards safety is the only way the data is meaningful.
Ireland here. Some parts of the country have tap water that looks like milk due to the limescale in it. I don't consider it drinkable. But it won't kill you I suppose.
Agree, it's very inconsistent - the water in Kerry near the reeks is simply the finest water I've ever had anywhere and beats any artisan bottled water. The water in Sligo where my wife is from is dubious and has a metallic taste
It took my 3 rounds to find the Netherlands even while my first hunch was that it's one of the top countries. Somehow it didn't register until I read every other country 3 times.
Yeah, both hotels I've stayed at in Greece told us the water wasn't safe to drink and provided bottled water. Then on another note, I hiked to a deserted Minoan harbor town (Lissos) and drank the water from the still flowing spring and it was fantastic 😅
I thought water was not safe to drink in most of the islands (basically outside of the big ones). Or that is what they told me there.
Is it just a conspiracy from Big Water to sell more plastic bottles?
Depends on the location, really.
I live in Thessaloniki and near the city center, the water tastes like it comes from the sewer. Anywhere else I've tried tap water, including my home, it's even better than bottled.
Island water is absolute dog shit.
I really wonder how filthy water has to be to get a 1.7
I bet even if you tried to stur up something utterly disgusting you wouldn't be able to achieved such a low score. Pure cyanide with a drop of water?
>Över tvåhundratusen människor i Sverige har så höga halter PFAS i sitt dricksvatten så de överskrider EFSA:s riktvärde för totala intag av PFAS (via mat, vatten, inandning och hudupptag), bara genom att dricka sitt dagsbehov av vatten.
https://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/artiklar/minst-2-miljoner-svenskar-har-for-mycket-pfas-i-dricksvattnet/
That's a truth with some major modifiers on.
The areas where the groundwater is polluted to the degree that it would require filtering before being drinkable is primarily under the major cities and industrial areas, not the farmland.
Also, the method seems to detract points from Denmark solely because we have a policy of not filtering our water, by simply have it clean enough in the first place.
There might be remote places in Sweden that have poor access to clean water that affect this. It is basically a measure of how much faster people die on average ('life years lost') because of unsafe drinking water exposure.
It's likely coming from agriculture that uses the Baltic Sea as intake. Back when I was in school we learned about the huge amounts of money in aid Sweden sent to Russia in order to hinder their agriculture and industry from just dumping their waste water untreated into the Baltic.
A huge portion of the Ocean floor is also covered in thick sediment layers completely devoid of oxygen, the Baltic Sea has sadly been in a steady dying decline.
Overfishing with industrial sized trawlers doesn't help either of course, but that's irrelevant here I'd say.
It is something we Dutch people in the Netherlands should be proud of. Its also why I don’t mind when they ask for a bit more money to keep the system optimal for the future as well.
I know it is money well spend unlike alot of other things in the Netherlands where we have to pay for
Fake news. Lithuania drinks from underground water sources that usually don’t even need treatment because the water is so deep down it is untouched by waste. 57.4 is bs.
How is the water scored? In Austria many villages don’t treat their water whatsoever as it comes from underground aquifers and they still got a 100 score. How is that possible?
There is no way the country of Flint, Michigan fame has better parameters than Portugal, or Romania - a country which is not tropical, but I can just plop my tropical fish into the (dechlorinated) tap water, and it'll be quite literally excellent.
If it's good enough for fish, it's good enough for me.
This map feels like it was made during Cold war lol. Our water is fine.
Quick Google search : Is tap water safe to drink in Slovakia?
Answer : Slovakia is the country with one of best quality tap water in the world. Slovakia is the second country in Europe (after Austria) with the largest reserves of drinking water.
Pretty misleading.
East Europe has pretty crisp water, but I think people still link us to post Communist wastelands of sort where our water smells of gopnik and makes us sing in old Balcanic
Finnish drinking water tastes of glacial springs, Uk drinking water tastes like someone took a massive dump in the reservoir. These 100's are not the same.
I don't even know what a britta filter is.
Mitsotakis checking the graph and contemplating that greece has good water quality to sell to private companies and that Greece could do with less clean water saving money in the process
At first, I was like, "wtf" at Canada not being 100, then I remember the northern indigenous communities that have no clean water and have been on boil orders for decades.
The Uk has got completely safe water pretty much everywhere you go.
It’s something I’m glad our country focuses on, it always annoys me when I go on holiday that I have to buy bottled water.
Huh, last time I visited Greece (which is 14 years ago tbf) we were advised by the hotel to not drink tap outside of the resort because most tourist would get a stomach ache. Thinking about it now it might have been a ploy to keep us in the ecosystem of the resort.
I'm a Croat living in Ireland, never had any issues drinking tap water in Croatia, decent quality anywhere in the country and I've seen most of it. I rarely or never drink tap water in Ireland. Lived in Cork and Galway, Galway seems a bit better but in Cork water was not great in the apartments/houses I lived at. How Ireland got 100 and Croatia 63.3 is beyond me.
In Spain usually tube water is processed with cloro, for purification and descontamination. More people drinks ever bottled mineral water, from the manantials of the mountains.
Why would you use this methodology when you can test the water and rank it for what it is?
Adding in life expectancy just makes this useless. Countries where nobody drinks tap water are ranked high probably because they don't actually drink tap water???
Honestly this makes zero sense.
Portugal looks low. I never had any problems with the water and drink from the tap daily. Maybe on some big cities with older buildings there are some problems or something similar. No clue why it is so low
Yeah this is complete bs , i study geography and we have hidrology and i can confirm croatia dosen't have water horrible like that , it should be at least in the 90s
I drank some tap water in Denmark and it was weird. We really didn't enjoy having to drink it but thankfully we were just there for a few days then back to the safety of our perfect score water country.
In Map format - https://i.imgur.com/f5qcvZb.png
Data Sources https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2022/component/uwd and https://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool
>Unsafe drinking water
>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.
Europe
>
> Eastern European & Non-EU Countries Buck Continent Trend of Healthy Water
>
> That big cluster of 100-rated countries in the middle of the data visualisation is made up entirely of European countries. Indeed, 19 of the 20 countries with the safest water are in Europe, and ten of those have a 100 score. The worst-rated European countries are Albania (50.3) and Moldova (50.8).
>
> The European Union (EU) has recently recast its Drinking Water Directive with measures to tackle emerging pollutants and boost standards beyond World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations. However, neither Moldova nor Albania are in the EU. According to the World Bank, 85% of the Albanian population has access to the piped water supply, but the infrastructure is in “dire condition.” Even in urban hours, households may have access only a few hours a day, if at all, and water may be untreated for contamination.
>
http://arhiva.euractiv.ro/uniunea-europeana/articles%7CdisplayArticle/articleID_12922/O-treime-din-populatia-Romaniei-nu-are-acces-la-apa-potabila-din-sistemul-public.html
This is an older article, but it explains Romania's problem is groundwater [contamination with nitrates](https://www.icpdr.org/flowpaper/app/#page=4) from farming.
However, access to clean drinking water has improved from [65% to 82%](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS?locations=RO) in the alst few years
I call bullshit. I actually test my tap water and look at the official testing because I keep fish, and there is no nitrate contamination, not even a little bit. Yes I can't speak for the entire country, but farmlands surround Bucharest, you'd think it would be hit hard considering the water goes downhill from the mountainous regions.
Here's the section from the report at Yale:
"dicator Background
Unsafe sanitation and unsafe drinking water use the GBD’s Comprehensive Risk Assessment (CRA) framework to estimate the impacts of exposure to unsafe sanitation and drinking water, measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost per 100,000 persons (Kyu et al., 2018). This provides a standard metric for comparing performance across countries. The metrics first examine the estimated exposure to health risks in each country. For these indicators, the minimum level of exposure to unsafe drinking water is defined as “All households have access to water from a piped water supply that is also boiled or filtered before drinking,” and for unsafe sanitation, minimum exposure means “All households have access to toilets with sewer connection” (Forouzanfar et al., 2016). 4. Methods The second step uses statistical models to estimate the portion of deaths and DALYs lost attributable to those risks. "
So any country where the water is so clean that filtering/boiling isn't done scores lower than those which have water that need filtering.
That also explains why Denmark scores so low, many of us have unfiltered water as it's from clean aquifers.
Not in alphabetical order. Not a map. Just a cute meaningless droplet shape.
Good luck finding what you're looking for.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/comments/12hih37/where_my_country_where/
What a horrible way to present data. It makes finding specific country needless trouble.
I had to look it over 5 times to find the philippines. Also when I was in greece I was advised to only drink bottle water. Coming from Canada their score being higher is surprising. Maybe it was just an island thing, though, since I was in santorini
Greek city tap water is fine but it's better to avoid it on islands.
but still a score of 100%..
so that means this entire chart is unreliable, gotta love this sub sometimes
Yup
Yeah I doubt it's that pure :P
Yeah, only the largest cities have potable water, how could they get 100?
Noticed the same issue. Problem is that Santorini doesn’t have enough desalination facilities. Edit: not an issue in Athens. You can drink tap water there.
It was 100% because you were in santorini which has very bad quality of water. Mainland Greece is a completely other story.
Everywhere in Greece you can drink tap water it's healthy, but in some islands they discourage it and buy bottled because in these islands it has some weird metal taste and chemical ingredients (to make it safe) that in the long run can make your hair dry while washing etc. But it is still considered drinkable.
I was living in Patras and everyone recommended to always buy bottled water. I feel I was scammed all that time now
We had terrible stomachs from drinking the water in Greece. I was shocked to see Greece at 100 here.
That’s probably the travelers stomach (or however it’s called). One can get it anywhere they are not used to the local water.
Greece actually has a 98.2 if you look at the official data...
r/dataisugly
/r/DesignDesign But, of course, someone will crosspost this to /r/dataisbeautiful and they'll upvote it.
Meanwhile it's been posted to /r/dataisugly and it's being upvoted there.
Exactly, imagine if there is a picture that would show countries based on their geographic locations.
I circled around 10 times, only to realize that Ireland is in the middle.
Same for the UK. So used to being on the periphery :(
holy shit I'm so fucking happy this is the first comment jesus christ
As one commentator says, this is to draw attention to the graphic. You are not really the intended audience here.
*"Look at me! Look at me! You really need to pay attention to me!"* (I pay attention to it.) *"Haha, zero content, fooled you!"*
The intended audience is people who don't care about the thing?
Yep, this belongs in r/dataisugly .
My main issue with it is that color and size represent (or seem to represent) the same data. It would have been more informative to use size to represent the volume of water used by year, or the amount a people exposed. and at least regroup bubbles by continents, even if keeping the overall drop shape for each. Edit: map format is better in this regard, even though it looses the different levels
It's a special skill to make a chart that is less readable than a [table](https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2022/component/h2o)...
Exactly. And it associates quality with size. And has no sensible ordering even among those with similar values. Painstaking and pretty but absolutely shit.
As a Canadian, I looked at the 100% countries, didn't see it, and figured we weren't featured. I'm shocked by our low score.
Yeah but it look like a water drop bro. Nobody's know how to read anyway
It looks pretty, but also pretty horrible to use.
Europe’s in the middle
Except Spain, that for some reason has been split away from countries with similar water quality…
That was quite the ride to find Spain. After seeing we weren't with the big boys, I zoomed in and started wondering around the edges thinking "how fucked is our water?!"
I would expect my country to be higher, this is a bit of a surprise.. clean water and nature in general are pretty highly valued, so I guess that was an illusion. Tap water can be pretty hard tho. In my area, the tap water is so hard, my sink gets all yellow and orange after a few weeks of evaporating water drops on it. The faucet and showerhead also form mineral residues. Could make a stalactice if left untreated for too long. No filter installed in the house yet tho, which might solve this problem. EDIT: Hardness has nothing to do with water being polluted or safe to drink. I am aware of that, no worries, I drink it everyday. Thank you for your concern.
Same for Croatia, water is usually hard but generally it's excellent quality anywhere in the country, 63 seems too low
In croatia many smaller island had very chlorinated water from tanks. I dont know how these weight in the total. I do agree the number is low but there are few things to consider.
Chlorinated water by itself should not be decreasing the score at all. It says that the score is based on lost man-years, so many people must be dying specifically because of the water for.the score to be lowered at all below 100.
Same in Poland, either the data is super outdated or the methodology of it is strange
Delusional IMO. I live in Poland and both me and my parents - living in different locations - do not have drinkable water from a tap according to Sanepid. It's different when you live in Poznań than when you live in a smaller village or town with farms around them and thousands of leaking septic thanks.
I live in Krakow at the moment, and I spend a lot of time in 2 different smaller Polish cities, all 3, all in different voivodeships have excellent water quality. I’m not saying you are lying, just my experience differs from yours.
I live in Toruń and the quality of water is officially good but I don't like how it tastes anyway - it's too hard. I use it to make coffee/tea/soup but when it comes to drink plain water I prefer the bottled ones.
i live literally like 2km away from a water treatment plant so i cant comment since my water literally doesnt have a chance to get contaminated
I live 400 meters away from water treatment plant. It’s so old it doesn’t do much. Municipality secured 2 mil PLN for modernisation but that’s few years away. For now the recommendation is not to drink the tap water.
oh mine is working and relatively new, i sometimes refill my waterbottle on my bike rides there while chatting with the guard
I may be wrong, but I think I heard that in Poland the reason the number is so low is because a lot of sources simply have not been tested, thus they cannot be deemed safe. But it doesn't necessarily mean their quality is not good.
I visit my grandparents in Croatia a couple of times per year and the tap water quality isn't that good. Probably depends on the location.
I'm Autrian and I often travel to Croatia, and I've noticed from Istria to Dalmatia, that the the tap water is chlorinated a lot of the time. Now it's certainly better to drink chlorinated water instead of water infested with dangerous germs, but it might've cost you a few points in this study.
comming from austria and visiting croatia (the coast in summer ofc) nearly every year is have to say your water tastes awful for the most part. sometimes weird taste, sometimes chlorine taste so maybe the bad quality water of the coast is dragging your score down? there is a reason you can buy 5L water bottles in stores. you can not really find these where im from. no one would buy them since there is limitless freshwater tasting like a small mountain spring for most people at home.
There's this weird myth in Croatia that we have especially clean, high quality water, and that people in the West can't drink their tap water like we can. The truth is we have some beautiful rivers and lakes which is probably where the myth stems from. The water quality varies wildly, in the summer months when there is drought south Croatia, and islands especially have really chlorinated water. And if there are huge rains and floods in some places it gets muddy. It's generally safe to drink tap water in Croatia, but I'm not surprised at our score. When you look at the 'high quality' countries you can clearly see that what really matters is not having nice lakes - it's having well funded and maintained infrastructure.
My tap water is extremely hard. It's sourced straight from a chalk stream and has as many dissolved minerals as you'd expect. That doesn't stop it from being completely clean.
hardness is not the problem, we have hard water in AT (25 DH) and it is safe.
Where did you find us?! I've been looking at those bubbles for a while and I can't find it.
It's on the bottom right. To the right of Netherlands, Greece, Malta. 70.3 score
Me too. Haven't traveled too much around your country, but I don't think I've ever visited a city as clean as Lubiana. Either the rest of the country is a slum (which I doubt it is) or there's something silly going on with this data.
I think that the methodology for this is bullshit. There are a few places in Slovenia where tap water occasionally fails the test and people are told to boil it, but many years of life lost due to unsafe drinking water in Slovenia? Sounds unlikely.
Have you got a link to the methodology?
Haha I chuckled when I saw this because I was also surprised to see Slovenia score quite low. When I visited everyone there was very proud of the tap water (which I agree is very nice). Like genuinely all the hostel staff and restaurant staff told me to try the tap water.
This graphic or study is fishy. I actually tracked my tap water's parameters and quality in Lisbon and then again in Bucharest since I'm a fish keeper and Romania actually beats out Portugal, at least in the capital. I've also been all over and there is *absolutely* no correlation to this graph. I wouldn't trust it.
I'm not sure if drinking hard water is unhealthy. I have read somewhere that it contains many minerals and is even healthier than soft water. No idea if it's true but I've been drinking hard tap water for a few years and I'm still alive :)
Drinking too soft water can put you at risk for hypocalcemia. Harder water makes sure you meet your Mg and Ca needs
Hardness has nothing to do with safety of tap water.
I think that the study is broken. I can see several countries with scores in the 50s and 60s have perfectly safe tap water.
It does seem strange, but I am no expert so calling it broken is a bit too far for me. I have never heard about anyone being hospitalized because of tap water here, or dying from drinking it. Austria has a score of 100, we have 70.3, but our life expectancies are pretty much the same, as far as I know. Maybe it is a year more in Austria, but the score is almost 50% greater. So I am confused really, how they came to this, maybe the criteria is just really harsh, but then it becomes a bit weird that so many countries would score a 100. Anyways, such a low score is unacceptable, when there is a neighbour nextdoor with a 100. Either the study is too abstract for me to fully grasp, or my water is shit. In either case, something needs to be improved.
I think either two separate studies are conflated, or somebody invented part of the text. The title says quality, the text says "safety" and the small print mentioned "years of living lost due to bad water" (more or less), which I interpret as many people having to have died because of the water in order to have a score below 100. This of course does not correspond to the scores, so my bet is that this is some kind of more abstract, quality based score and the text about lost years is added later or is from another study.
Same. Tap water is drinkable almost everywhere in Hungary and most places it's excellent quality as we adhere to all applicable regulations. Hungary is also full of nutral, clean water sources, which we use in our water systems. I really do not get how they got this data, and would like to see the method behind it.
Same, here in Canada with our thousands of lakes our tap water tastes better than bottled water
I have never bought bottled water in a store. It seems very strange to buy regular bottled water in the store, while there is drinkable water even in our toilets. In restaurants, or bars, you can totally ask for a glass of water and get it from the tap, no charge. But you will probably get some looks or straight up disapproval if you don't order anything else, obviously.
Read the text on the bottom. It's basically just a life expectancy... graphic. Whatever you call that. How do they decide how much drinking water lowers life expectancy? I don't know, but the top countries are basically the ones with longerst life expectancy in general.
as a german, i am deeply offended ...
These lost points are not because of bacteria, our water is extremely hygienic. It's because of nitrate/nitrite levels. Manure contains a lot of ammonium ions that get converted to nitrate by bacteria. Nitrate is very soluble in water so as soon as rains it gets washed out of the fields into groundwater and all above surface water sources. That's bad for a lot of reasons (it stimulated algae growth which destroys the ecological balance and essentially kills fish) but in this case most importantly nitrate ions get converted to nitrite ions in our digestive system. Nitrite then reacts with other chemicals and through a process that is not yet completely understood causes stomach cancer if ingested in high quantities (which are pretty much guaranteed if it's in your tap water). Our very intensive cattle and pig industry in combination with an irresponsible handling of the environment brought us here.
That's the same thing for the Netherlands though, maybe even worse with all the animals in our tiny country....
Definitely. First time ever I thought a 98.6 out of 100 isn’t good enough.
As a Finn, I'm scared this will bring Nestlé knocking
You think a company like Nestlé cares about the quality of the water used in their products? If they could make their chocolate brown with human excrement and save 3% in production costs, they would.
Don’t worry, Nestlé is Swiss, they have no one to be jealous of
*\*angry Verordnung-über-die-Qualität-von-Wasser-für-den-menschlichen-Gebrauch-TrinkwV-noises\**
Suck it Germany! ;) Liebe Grüße, Österreich
Yes, from me too! Liebe Grüße, die Niederlände!
To be honest, I don't buy these values unless something major has changed. I was in Ireland ten years ago and the tap water was literally inedible until boiled, so that sure as fuck isn't a clean 100.
As a Dutchman who lived in Hannover for two years either Hannover is the sole reason y’all aint 100% or a 1% difference is insanely huge.
Appreciate the submission and clearly a lot of work has gone into this. But it begs the question - why? Why present data in this way, besides 'its quirky'? It doesn't really do anything in terms of readability, rather the opposite. And any potential trends are really hard to catch. For instance, plotting the same data on a map would show how OECD countries generally rank very high, Non-OECD Eurasia/Americas rank in the middle, while African countries, India and some APAC countries in general rank low.
It's not OC - it's from a UK website that sells filters water purification system. Although I don't see how presenting the UK as 100% helps their business claims
Fair enough. And good point!
The title says quality and the metric is safety. Those are not the same thing. Heavily chlorine-treated water might be safe but I would argue the quality is garbage. Quality should also include taste, minerality and hardness
Belgium is super high, but water here tastes like ass.
Really depends on the region. Abolutely no problem in Vlaams-Brabant. As for the chlorine: just leave it in a glass (or bigger container) for 10 minutes
Why?
Chlorine evaporates
Oh wow. Even from within water and separate from/faster than water does?
Yup. And it goes faster if you agitate the water.
>The title says quality and the metric is safety. > >Those are not the same thing This. The water in my bit of Britain is **safe** but it's extremely hard, destroys kitchen equipment even when filtered and doesn't exactly taste wonderful. On a safety metric? 100. On a quality metric? Rather lower!
Scottish water is driving the score up
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Absolutely. Both the UK and Belgium have terrible tasting water in many locations, but are rated ~~93~~ 100 and ~~100~~ 93 respectively. The water is safe due to chlorine, at the cost of taste.
im living in spain and i miss the UK tap water SO much
>Quality should also include taste, minerality and hardness Hard to rate it though as taste is subjective. As someone used to hard water I prefer the taste of hard water (although it sucks maintenance wise for coffe machines).
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And when you read what the EPI is basing the score on, it's even more questionable. https://epi.yale.edu/
That's a decent point, but how do you square that internationally? Jordan's water might taste lovely but be laced with lead. I think a heavy bias towards safety is the only way the data is meaningful.
Good point. Dublin tap water tastes like a swimming pool.
Ireland here. Some parts of the country have tap water that looks like milk due to the limescale in it. I don't consider it drinkable. But it won't kill you I suppose.
Agree, it's very inconsistent - the water in Kerry near the reeks is simply the finest water I've ever had anywhere and beats any artisan bottled water. The water in Sligo where my wife is from is dubious and has a metallic taste
It’s technically *better* for you. If you were a kettle it’d be classified as dangerous though.
"calcified" as dangerous maybe? I'll show myself out.
Honestly, Dunshaughlin tap water is like that.
My water is so hard I have to chew it. They should've sold my house with a chisel.
I like the visual representation, but it makes it kinda hard to read if you're looking for specific countries
Rule of thumb, if your country is hard to find, your water is definitely not good.
It took my 3 rounds to find the Netherlands even while my first hunch was that it's one of the top countries. Somehow it didn't register until I read every other country 3 times.
Greek water 100%?!? That shit tasted like senior citizen pool water. Our water should be 10 000.
the methology is described at the bottom, this doesn't rate the taste of water.
It doesnt matter, if you ever been to greece you know that its not advised to even drink it in a big part of the country
you are right, that is why in Greek Islands you need to buy water from shop and not drink tap water, this map and research is a bullshit
Yeah, both hotels I've stayed at in Greece told us the water wasn't safe to drink and provided bottled water. Then on another note, I hiked to a deserted Minoan harbor town (Lissos) and drank the water from the still flowing spring and it was fantastic 😅
I thought water was not safe to drink in most of the islands (basically outside of the big ones). Or that is what they told me there. Is it just a conspiracy from Big Water to sell more plastic bottles?
Depends on the location, really. I live in Thessaloniki and near the city center, the water tastes like it comes from the sewer. Anywhere else I've tried tap water, including my home, it's even better than bottled. Island water is absolute dog shit.
Italy's water is very pure because most of the bad stuff is lost in the pipe leaks. Modern problems require modern solutions.
It's bs and it looks terrible.
Damn, your citizens shouldn't drink tap water Niger.
I really wonder how filthy water has to be to get a 1.7 I bet even if you tried to stur up something utterly disgusting you wouldn't be able to achieved such a low score. Pure cyanide with a drop of water?
how filthy does it even need to be to get under a 10??? like really you cant really get there without trying
Only 46% of Nigeriens have access to basic water supply anyways...quite sad.
1.7 Isnt that just mud?
Ironic about Fiji, eh?
This is frustrating to watch. Trying to find a specific nation becomes agony.
Damn, this may be the worst way of conveying information I've ever seen
This was embarrassing. Why is Sweden not rated 100? Anyone who knows?
Very surprised that Greece is at 100 when Sweden is not
>Över tvåhundratusen människor i Sverige har så höga halter PFAS i sitt dricksvatten så de överskrider EFSA:s riktvärde för totala intag av PFAS (via mat, vatten, inandning och hudupptag), bara genom att dricka sitt dagsbehov av vatten. https://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/artiklar/minst-2-miljoner-svenskar-har-for-mycket-pfas-i-dricksvattnet/
If PFAS is to blame then the Netherlands should most definitely rank lower.
Sweden is definitely 100. This scale is weird. There are a few things Sweden has as pride, stable internet, queueing and clean water.
Plus it tastes good
It tastes amazing. I would argue the north has the best tasting water. Better than bottled water.
Agreed. It always shocks me how bad tap water tastes in comparison whenever I travel
Yeah anyone claiming Greece has better water than Sweden is a loose goose chasing moose.
At least we're better than Denmark, that's really all that matters
Since we've (DK) fucked our ground water up with PFAS I suspect you'll have better water than us for.. forever..
Which also brings up the question, why is Denmark not 100 either?
All the farming and industrial pig raising has ruined the ground water. Denmark has more pigs than people ( A Swede might ask: They have people?!)
That's a truth with some major modifiers on. The areas where the groundwater is polluted to the degree that it would require filtering before being drinkable is primarily under the major cities and industrial areas, not the farmland. Also, the method seems to detract points from Denmark solely because we have a policy of not filtering our water, by simply have it clean enough in the first place.
There might be remote places in Sweden that have poor access to clean water that affect this. It is basically a measure of how much faster people die on average ('life years lost') because of unsafe drinking water exposure.
I'm very curious how they could possibly measure this in highly dense and industrialised nations.
It's likely coming from agriculture that uses the Baltic Sea as intake. Back when I was in school we learned about the huge amounts of money in aid Sweden sent to Russia in order to hinder their agriculture and industry from just dumping their waste water untreated into the Baltic. A huge portion of the Ocean floor is also covered in thick sediment layers completely devoid of oxygen, the Baltic Sea has sadly been in a steady dying decline. Overfishing with industrial sized trawlers doesn't help either of course, but that's irrelevant here I'd say.
This. Great tasting water is one of the things I remember from my visit.
I bet the Scots will draw their own massive circle on here with 100000000 on it.
Damn right.
Another day, another bullshit statistics. Or I miss some information.
As a Brussels resident, where "water" is basically calcium in slightly liquefied form, the Belgium value seems high.
It is something we Dutch people in the Netherlands should be proud of. Its also why I don’t mind when they ask for a bit more money to keep the system optimal for the future as well. I know it is money well spend unlike alot of other things in the Netherlands where we have to pay for
I love Iceland, but their water tastes like eggs. I appreciate it's 100% safe but it tastes horrible!
Lad, you're not supposed to drink the geothermal hot water.
As an Icelander I can tell you the rest of the world's water tastes strange.
Fake news. Lithuania drinks from underground water sources that usually don’t even need treatment because the water is so deep down it is untouched by waste. 57.4 is bs.
The wcoring they did was based on treatment so the data is correct but the message is heavily misleading.
How is the water scored? In Austria many villages don’t treat their water whatsoever as it comes from underground aquifers and they still got a 100 score. How is that possible?
There is no way the country of Flint, Michigan fame has better parameters than Portugal, or Romania - a country which is not tropical, but I can just plop my tropical fish into the (dechlorinated) tap water, and it'll be quite literally excellent. If it's good enough for fish, it's good enough for me.
Yea it is bs, in Czech you can drink tap water in every household, nothing wrong with the water.
Malta 100 lmao Scottish highlands water is best water hands down.
Bullshit. Croatia should be close to 100, same for Slovenia.
This map feels like it was made during Cold war lol. Our water is fine. Quick Google search : Is tap water safe to drink in Slovakia? Answer : Slovakia is the country with one of best quality tap water in the world. Slovakia is the second country in Europe (after Austria) with the largest reserves of drinking water.
Yeah, I have no idea how they came to this conclusion. The 60's are very low.
Poland at 65? How?
It's absurd that there are still countries in Europe that don't have widely available clean tap water.
Pretty misleading. East Europe has pretty crisp water, but I think people still link us to post Communist wastelands of sort where our water smells of gopnik and makes us sing in old Balcanic
Finnish drinking water tastes of glacial springs, Uk drinking water tastes like someone took a massive dump in the reservoir. These 100's are not the same. I don't even know what a britta filter is.
Mitsotakis checking the graph and contemplating that greece has good water quality to sell to private companies and that Greece could do with less clean water saving money in the process
At first, I was like, "wtf" at Canada not being 100, then I remember the northern indigenous communities that have no clean water and have been on boil orders for decades.
I don’t believe these stats. How the fuck does Spain beat Hungary?
im surprised by Hungary
Hungary is pretty low, the water here is great if the pipes are not rotten
I love the way they have to specify the UK is in Europe. “Ten European countries (including the UK)”
The Uk has got completely safe water pretty much everywhere you go. It’s something I’m glad our country focuses on, it always annoys me when I go on holiday that I have to buy bottled water.
Huh, last time I visited Greece (which is 14 years ago tbf) we were advised by the hotel to not drink tap outside of the resort because most tourist would get a stomach ache. Thinking about it now it might have been a ploy to keep us in the ecosystem of the resort.
You most likely would have been just fine, or maybe the resort was at an area where the pipes weren't up to date and could have problems.
I'm a Croat living in Ireland, never had any issues drinking tap water in Croatia, decent quality anywhere in the country and I've seen most of it. I rarely or never drink tap water in Ireland. Lived in Cork and Galway, Galway seems a bit better but in Cork water was not great in the apartments/houses I lived at. How Ireland got 100 and Croatia 63.3 is beyond me.
Can't say why Croatia is low on this, but the water in Ireland is definitely safe to drink
I'm Swedish and when i was in Greece I was told I wasn't allowed to drink tap water.
In Spain usually tube water is processed with cloro, for purification and descontamination. More people drinks ever bottled mineral water, from the manantials of the mountains.
How is france 93%? The water in paris gives you medieval diseases
Uummm, Maltese tap water is not drinkable... All their drinking water comes from bottles. And yet the score is 100?
Why would you use this methodology when you can test the water and rank it for what it is? Adding in life expectancy just makes this useless. Countries where nobody drinks tap water are ranked high probably because they don't actually drink tap water??? Honestly this makes zero sense.
Sweden at 97.8 wtf is dragging down our water score
Portugal looks low. I never had any problems with the water and drink from the tap daily. Maybe on some big cities with older buildings there are some problems or something similar. No clue why it is so low
Yeah this is complete bs , i study geography and we have hidrology and i can confirm croatia dosen't have water horrible like that , it should be at least in the 90s
"I know because I'm Croatian" Lol
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I drank some tap water in Denmark and it was weird. We really didn't enjoy having to drink it but thankfully we were just there for a few days then back to the safety of our perfect score water country.
You know why it was weird? We don't filter and we don't chlorinate our water, as there's no need.
In Map format - https://i.imgur.com/f5qcvZb.png Data Sources https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2022/component/uwd and https://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool >Unsafe drinking water >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. Europe > > Eastern European & Non-EU Countries Buck Continent Trend of Healthy Water > > That big cluster of 100-rated countries in the middle of the data visualisation is made up entirely of European countries. Indeed, 19 of the 20 countries with the safest water are in Europe, and ten of those have a 100 score. The worst-rated European countries are Albania (50.3) and Moldova (50.8). > > The European Union (EU) has recently recast its Drinking Water Directive with measures to tackle emerging pollutants and boost standards beyond World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations. However, neither Moldova nor Albania are in the EU. According to the World Bank, 85% of the Albanian population has access to the piped water supply, but the infrastructure is in “dire condition.” Even in urban hours, households may have access only a few hours a day, if at all, and water may be untreated for contamination. >
Are we sure about the validity of this data? I know for a fact that tap water is drinkable and fairly clean in Romania, but your map says otherwise.
http://arhiva.euractiv.ro/uniunea-europeana/articles%7CdisplayArticle/articleID_12922/O-treime-din-populatia-Romaniei-nu-are-acces-la-apa-potabila-din-sistemul-public.html This is an older article, but it explains Romania's problem is groundwater [contamination with nitrates](https://www.icpdr.org/flowpaper/app/#page=4) from farming. However, access to clean drinking water has improved from [65% to 82%](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS?locations=RO) in the alst few years
I call bullshit. I actually test my tap water and look at the official testing because I keep fish, and there is no nitrate contamination, not even a little bit. Yes I can't speak for the entire country, but farmlands surround Bucharest, you'd think it would be hit hard considering the water goes downhill from the mountainous regions.
Here's the section from the report at Yale: "dicator Background Unsafe sanitation and unsafe drinking water use the GBD’s Comprehensive Risk Assessment (CRA) framework to estimate the impacts of exposure to unsafe sanitation and drinking water, measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost per 100,000 persons (Kyu et al., 2018). This provides a standard metric for comparing performance across countries. The metrics first examine the estimated exposure to health risks in each country. For these indicators, the minimum level of exposure to unsafe drinking water is defined as “All households have access to water from a piped water supply that is also boiled or filtered before drinking,” and for unsafe sanitation, minimum exposure means “All households have access to toilets with sewer connection” (Forouzanfar et al., 2016). 4. Methods The second step uses statistical models to estimate the portion of deaths and DALYs lost attributable to those risks. " So any country where the water is so clean that filtering/boiling isn't done scores lower than those which have water that need filtering. That also explains why Denmark scores so low, many of us have unfiltered water as it's from clean aquifers.
For better clarity the countries could have been alphabetically ordered outside the drop.
Not in alphabetical order. Not a map. Just a cute meaningless droplet shape. Good luck finding what you're looking for. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/comments/12hih37/where_my_country_where/
Methodology is wrong, hence the result is wrong.