Fooling Ourselves: Voluntary Programs Fail to Clean Up Dirty Water

Drinking water, lakes and rivers in Iowa and across the Corn Belt are in serious trouble because of polluted farm runoff.To tackle the problem, for decades we've taken the approach favored by agricultural interests – making federal tax dollars available for conservation practices that curb runoff, encouraging farmers to adopt those practices, then hoping enough of them volunteer to do the right thing.But that approach has a fatal flaw: farmers who voluntarily start conservation practices can just as easily stop.And that's exactly what's happening in eight key Iowa watersheds, an EWG investigation found. If what we found is true statewide and throughout the Corn Belt, it's no wonder the water is still dirty.EWG used aerial imagery to track what happened between 2011 and 2014 with two simple but important practices – stream buffers and grassed waterways – in eight watersheds prioritized in the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy. In that period, some landowners in those watersheds started following practices to control runoff, but others stopped. In the end there was no lasting gain in protection and no or miniscule progress in reducing runoff.

Community-Level Analysis of Drinking Water Data Highlights the Importance of Drinking Water Metrics for the State, Federal Environmental Health Justice Priorities in the United States

Research studies analyzing the geospatial distribution of air pollution and other types of environmental contamination documented the persistence of environmental health disparities between communities. Due to the shortage of publicly available data, only limited research has been published on the geospatial distribution of drinking water pollution. Here we present a framework for the joint consideration of community-level drinking water data and demographic data. Our analysis builds on a comprehensive data set of drinking water contaminant occurrence for the United States for 2014–2019 and the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2015–2019) from the U.S. Census Bureau. Focusing on the U.S. states of California and Texas for which geospatial data on community water system service boundaries are publicly available, we examine cumulative cancer risk for water served by community water systems of different sizes relative to demographic characteristics for the populations served by these water systems. In both California and Texas, greater cumulative cancer risk was observed for water systems serving communities with a higher percentage of Hispanic/Latino and Black/African American community members. This investigation demonstrates that it is both practical and essential to incorporate and expand the drinking water data metrics in the analysis of environmental pollution and environmental health. The framework presented here can support the development of public policies to advance environmental health justice priorities on state and federal levels in the U.S