About 43% of Utah’s population drinks fluoridated water. The bulk of those residents are in Salt Lake and Davis counties, where voters approved the practice in 2000.
That will change on May 7. The reason why is front and center on the South Davis Water District website: “In accordance with the recently passed bill, HB 81, the District will no longer be adding fluoride to drinking water beginning on May 7th.”
Jake Ferguson, the general manager of the district, said they add between 50 to 100 pounds of sodium fluoride into the water system every month to service roughly 10,600 residents. But they’re not going to do that anymore.
“We're essentially going to let it just run out,” he said.
The current supply will be washed out of the public drinking supply water by May 7, he said.
Salt Lake City Public Utilities relies on hydrofluosilicic acid, a chemical used in water fluoridation programs to adjust its fluoride levels. Director Laura Briefer said they will keep adding it up until the effective date. They add up to 0.7 mg/L of fluoride to the water system, which serves about 380,000 Utahns.
After May 7, it won’t take long to flush it out of the water.
“It will be a matter of days for all of the added fluoride to be out of the system,” she said. “Essentially, that additional fluoride will leave the system as the water leaves the system through consumption.”
The new law only prohibits cities and municipalities from adding fluoride to the public water supply. It doesn’t force water districts, who are usually tasked with handling the sometimes dangerous mineral, to remove all traces of fluoride from the systems. The natural amount of fluoride that usually occurs in water systems will not need to be extracted.
Each agency will save some money, too.
Ferguson said it will reduce costs by around $20,000 annually. Briefer said the city will recoup about $100,000 each year because the system is big. But she estimated it’ll cost between $100,000 to $200,000 to properly dispose of all the fluoride they currently have in stock. Both Briefer and Ferguson are working with the state on that.
As for the equipment used to fluoridate the water, Ferguson said since they're a government entity, they’re technically supposed to try and sell it.
“But I highly doubt that there's going to be someone interested in it,” he said. “It may end up getting junked.”
Briefer said they will likely repurpose their equipment. She added, it might be worth keeping just in case something changes.
“We may have a need for the infrastructure in the future, for some other reason or even for this reason, if fluoride is deemed to be beneficial to put back in the water in the future,” she said.
