Native son- If you think it is so easy to meet even tougher than current water quality standards do this for me. Take 2 gallons of your tap water(presumably already cleaned by the city) and make it meet all current federal standards. Have a TCLP test done and then purchase the chemistry and/or filtering media to remove all found impurities. I think you will soon realize that cleaning water on a large scale is VERY expensive. Hopefully you will also realize that reduce, reuse and recycle in conjunction with Best Management Practices takes time to develop and implement. The water standards have become over 4 times more stringent in the last ten years. One of the reasons they are not even tougher yet is that the municipalities cannot locate the technology or cannot afford the proprietary technology of private companies to meet the tougher standards with your drinking water. After selling tons upon tons of hazardous waste to a recycling firm in Corpus Christy TX I can tell you that the entire state of TX is properly focused on environmental issues. This firm has almost been shut down by the EPA because of the fact that they recycle everything they receive including the water and the EPA thinks they should not get recycling credits(read tax and fee reductions) because they sell the result to big business as raw material(extremely pure without mining). They were disallowed from accepting my material by the EPA which forced me to LANDFILL over five tons of lead and copper bearing sludge (perhaps near your favorite stream). All this because the liberal democrats in office couldn't stand missing out on a buck or two of tax revenue. One of hundreds of true stories about the EPA and DOE. They are getting better but they need a leader that realizes that it is OUR money and we give them some of it to use.....not the other way around.