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Through advertising and labeling, the consumer can become very confused. There are different degrees of ?purity?. Just because a company claims to provide pure water filters does not mean that the result will be what you need.
People have different needs, but let's assume for the purposes of this article that you are looking for a pure water filter and your source is a public supply. What flows through your tap has been through many processes. Disinfection, filtration, flocculation, sand beds and others are used to try to protect the public's safety.
All of these are good and necessary, but there are some problems caused by disinfection methods and some problems that just cannot be addressed by the facilities. Nearly all treatment facilities chlorinate. It doesn't taste good and causes digestive problems, so you want water filters that will remove it.
Disinfection Method Problems
Chlorination and other methods of disinfection create byproducts. Trihalomethanes or THMs are the most dangerous of them. They include a number of compounds that can vaporize along with water and other chemicals.
They are known carcinogens. The levels are monitored and supposedly safe, but no one knows for sure. They do know that a large number of new bladder and colorectal cancers are caused each year by exposure to THMs. So, you need a pure water filter that removes THMs.
People can debate it all they want, but I found this fact very convincing. Several countries that offer public healthcare are doing studies about how much these new cancer cases caused by THM exposure cost the government. If they didn't know for a certainty that THM exposure causes cancer, they wouldn't be studying the healthcare costs associated with treating the patients.
Truth in Label?
There are at least three different companies that bear the words ?pure water filters? on their labels or something very similar. They all remove chlorine, but only one of them removes THMs.
The PUR pure water filter does not remove THMs or VOCs, which are chemical compounds that are known to contaminate the waters around the world. Many of them cause cancer, too.
The Ever- pure water filters do not remove THMS, VOCs or lindane. It's a banned substance throughout the world, but at one time it was widely used in agriculture to kill insects. So, it is still in the groundwater.
The Aqua- pure water filter does not remove MTBE (a gasoline additive that seeped into groundwater from leaking tanks and spills) and it only certified to remove 95% of the toxic metal lead, only 97% of chlorine and only 92% of THMs.
There are other truly pure water filters that stand on their performance data and their reputation among customers, rather than advertising on television and in print. They remove all of the things mentioned here and more, providing a higher degree of purity than any of the others.