ABSTRACT
Water pollutants include: detergents, food waste, insecticides and herbicides, fuels and lubricants, industrial solvents, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, industrial waste, heavy metals, acids, nitrates, and phosphates. Fertiliser run-off into rivers, causing eutrophication, is a particular problem. The best drinking water is never pure in the sense that it's only H2O. As someone's local water company will readily tell that, there are inevitably minerals in it, although there are regulatory limits to resources such as lead, aluminium, copper, iron, arsenic, fluoride and nitrate that water might contain. UNICEF, the United Nations agency focusing on children, has a programme it calls Water, Sanitation and Hygiene that focuses on children's ability to drink safe water, and the journey they must take to collect it. UNICEF has highlighted that the opportunity cost from a lack of access to water disproportionately falls on women and girls, who collectively spend as much as 200 million hours every day just collecting water.
