Polish water safe to drink?

roca posted that five years ago and the water very well have could have contained interference.
Look what Wroclaw Boy said about it.


Since then Poland has been replacing the old water pipes and things have improved to the point that the Polish people are starting to drink the water from the taps in their homes again.

That was the POINT here.
roca also made another very good point.


Your source Notty will most likely get deleted since it is not in English.

dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3683193/From-Spain-France-Russia-Croatia-Countries-Europe-drink-tap-water-places-really-shouldn-t.html
many, many more....

Poor water quality was a problem more than a decade ago. Now it's just a stupid stereotype made up mostly buy some of the most ignorant Poles themselves (leftards that spit on Polish flag etc.You know... Zjebowit's kind).

In Poland it depends very much on where you are. There are even variations within Warsaw.

@jon357
Just like everywhere else. I had tried the tap water in Northamptonshire and it was horrible.

And certainly safe.

There are a few parts of Warsaw where residents don't drink the tap water.

Sales of bottled water are huge here in Poland.

that's right. When we lived in Wales we had purest coldest mountain water...came down to London and my kids were spitting the water out in horror when they tasted it..

the funny thing is , as I come from London , I only realised how rank it was once I had been away. I swear there is grit in it.

So I guess you just get used to what you know.

Same in Yorkshire - very good quality. Here in PL there are a lot of issues with the pipes that affect taste, hence people usually preferring bottled.

@jon357
Even if so the thread is about if the tap water is SAFE to drink and it is 100% safe indeed. Tap water in Poland must have passed all EU tests and regulations. The very same as in France, Germany or Spain.

The EU have expressed concerns about water quality here and have identified serious shortcomings.

Sales of bottled water have long been very high here.

source pls


as well as sales of beer.

Not necessarily. You can have varying quality of water even in an EU country. It's not likely to give you typhoid or anything extreme but in a rural area for example you could have water compromised by fecal matter from septic tanks or as people have said contaminated by old pipes. I saw an article from a Conde Nast travel guide which gave a list of countries where water is safe to drink. Poland was on it, but so was Ireland and although the water is safe to drink as a rule in Ireland, there are frequent 'boil' notices issued by the Department of Health for some rural areas because the private well water supplies can be contaminated by agricultural slurry. It happens for example during very wet weather which we get rather a lot of! Yet Ireland has 100% compliance with EU standards. Point is being an EU country doesn't necessarily mean that the water is completely safe at all times. That's a work in progress. The EU tests it every three years and then produces a report. Here's the latest ones for each member state available on their site for 2011-2013. If you take a look at the one for Poland you will see that though the water is largely safe there is still some work to do. If you go to the section entitled Causes for Non-compliance and Remedial Actions, you will see that there were instances of non-compliance with standards which required treatment:

ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-drink/reporting_en.html

That's what i said. Polish tap water is as safe as any other EU member state's.

Exactly. Important to know exactly which areas are affected.

And sales of bottled water here are still huge.

Yes, that's true. My own husband won't touch tap water even at home, though all the pipes in our building were renewed about three years ago. He's a Muszynianka man :) Comparing the EU reports on Poland and Ireland I noticed that although Ireland has a higher instance of 'emergencies' (because of the rural contamination issues from slurry pits etc) Poland has a much higher rate of remedial actions required in a given year. Unfortunately the Polish report didn't state the overall level of compliance with regulations/standards. Ireland had 99.9% for 2011 and 2012 and 100% for 2013. And yet as I say, drinking water is not always 'safe' there in rural areas. The main thing, as you say Jon is for the information to be made public and for people to be made aware and put on a 'boil' notice. I'm not sure if they do that in Poland.

There's a lack of trust within society concerning all public health information here. I remember when the pollution indicator on al. Jerozolimskie was taken down because the readings were usually off the top of the scale. Because of the issues with water (and especially long-term damage due to low-quality metal pipes) people just don't trust it.

We have a very deep well that supplies water to the whole house - much better and usually people's first choice if they are able to do that.

Those metal pipes you speak of are sometimes "lead" pipes.
Boiling your water does not remove toxic metals or chemicals from the water.
Even bottled water is unsafe sometimes.
When the plastic gets exposed to the hot sun it causes a chemical reaction that makes the water toxic from the plastic.
May I brag, we are blessed here on my property, to have a bubbling artesian well that has a flow of 30 gallons a minute of ice cold water that tests zero interference that flows 24/7/365.

Does Poland have test kits that you can take random samples of water yourself and send them into the health department to have them tested for a small fee like they do here in the U.S.A. ?

Merged:

Is tap water in Poland safe to drink?

I guess it depends on the town or city but I want your experience.

Here in Sofia, Bulgaria the tap water has a great taste but it has Helicobacter pylori in it. So it's better to only drink mineral or if tap to boil it (I get no tummy problems that way, otherwise I outright need antibiotics).

No wonder bulgarians are so stupid. You have brain worms in your water.

Are you drunk again? That's the gut bacteria, not a worm.

The water quality getting better and the good thing is that Poland does not add fluoride to its public water supply. Fluoride additives are still common in less developed countries like the US, though. The water quality is much better in the Polish mountains; some folks still drink it directly from well.

There is a region in Germany where I have been buying bottled water for years because the tap water, officially drinkable, contains so many additives that after boiling it once, a residue forms on the kettle. Suitable for coffee but not for tea due to sediment. ☕🫖

I doubt such water would be suitable for coffee unless we treat it as an additive too ;)

I have to say, Polish tap water tastes pretty good. Go to parts of Spain and you'll see the difference, it's like drinking from a public swimming pool. "Glass of chlorine por favour!" Absolutely disgusting.

Taste is not everything. They can now make water full of chemicals taste great.

The tap water in Poznań is hard. Leaves a film that is like a very thin strip of plaque, especially noticeable in a cup of tea. Freaked me out first time I saw it.

I have been drinking Polish tap water for almost half a century, and I've never had any health problems, so I guess it's safe to drink. :)

Much the same.

There used to be one part of Warsaw where the mains supply was different from the rest of the city and where people always used bottled however that issue's been sorted now.

I've used a britta filter for unboiled water. I remember when people told me that just bringing water to a boil wasn't enough it should be boiled for about 10 minutes before being used...

Mother-in-law uses the same. Produces a fine cup of drinking water.

Probably reverse osmosis is the best long term solution for clean water. Filters are good, but very inefficient.