Environmental Working Group: Environmental “Worry” Group

Fearmongering and Questioning Water Quality

There’s really only one thing you need to know about the Environmental Working Group when it comes to its studies of toxins: 79 percent of members of the Society of Toxicology (scientists who know a little something about toxins) who rated the group say that the Environmental Working Group overstates the health risk of chemicals.

At the end of 2009, the Environmental Working Group released a report on the quality of water available out of the tap in various localities across the country. Its results were both explosive – generating many unquestioning headlines from newspapers worried about their local water supplies – and mostly bunk. Between 2004 and 2008, the EWG found that the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority in Florida “reported 45 impurities in the water,” according to the Pensacola News Journal. The ECUA then commissioned the University of West Florida to examine the water. The results? “The UWF study showed that the ECUA did not exceed a single water quality standard set forth by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. ‘According to the accepted drinking water quality regulations, the water provided by ECUA offers minimal risk and is safe for human consumption according to federal and State of Florida standards,’” the study said. Other responses called the study’s methodology into question. “The fault is with the Environmental Working Group,” David Wright of the Riverside Public Utilities told the Press-Enterprise. “They lied about groundwater test data and represented that as tap water data.” The EWG had tested water that had yet to be treated and passed it off as the stuff that comes out of your tap.

https://www.activistfacts.com/organizations/113-environmental-working-group/