Re: Clean Water and a Healthy Planet

Where I live SW CT, Culligan is definitely more of a sales company, than a water company, but they do a bang-up business.

My friend worked for them as a tank driver many years ago.   He let me ride with him a few times and take water samples from a nice chunk of territory that I'd never have been able to get access to otherwise.

You hit the nail on the head, fear, is the great motivator for ~90% of the customers.  The interesting thing is that I did discover a small sulfide island in the area that I could not account for using the macro geologic data I had at the time. 

So aside from a few homes that had a *real* odor problem with their water the rest were just gullible.  I happen to know that hard water make the best coffee, but H2S will ruin anything is comes in contact with.

Since it is New England and the strata is granite there were also some iron problems.  But most were for hardness & turbitity control.

I just find it difficult to believe that a softener using even a few hundred lbs of salt per month has any significant impact when compared to a winter storm that might call for the spreading of 5,000 tons in the course of a few days.

The nature of chlorides it that most are soluble which is why most of it is in the sea.  I wish more folks were aware of the salting-up of large areas of Calif that drain farmlands.  But more important those toxic selenium ponds that have accumulated after decades of agricultural drainage and evaporation. 

It seems to me that dumping a ton of fertilizer on every acre of farmland is a far bigger problem than 100lb of salt with the sewage.

So I'm hoping to learn something here, aside from the Chloride
connection I mentioined, and its obvious cause for revulsion, what
exactly if the effect of elevated Cl- ion in the settings you're
discussing?