Tapping into Koreans' fear of the faucet

Four percent — only 4.4 percent of Korean households drink water straight from the tap, unboiled, unfiltered, poured into a glass as it comes. 

Another 35.2 percent drink it boiled. Beyond that, 53.6 percent of Korean households use a water purifier and 34.3 percent buy bottled water, a 2024 government survey of some 72,000 households showed, with households free to name more than one method.

It's not outright rejection, though: 66 percent of households still cook with tap water. Tap water is used everywhere in the Korean kitchen. For rice, for soup, for barley tea. It's just that people are not drinking straight from the tap. 

The numbers are a stark contrast to those of Korea's neighboring nation, the closest country with a directly comparable government survey. In Japan, 39.1 percent drink tap water straight while 16.2 percent boil it before drinking tap water. 

Nothing is wrong with the water, at least officially. The government maintains that tap water supplied around the country meets national drinking-water standards; Seoul tests its supply against 362 parameters, more than double the World Health Organization's recommendation, and publishes the readings in real time.

Koreans largely believe it, too: 61.3 percent of households agreed that the quality of tap water can be trusted. But apparently, not enough to drink it.

So what, then, keeps Koreans from taking to the tap?

The simple answer is a deep-seated distrust that lingers from an era when the water wasn't what it is today.

Drinking boiled 

Historically, Koreans never really were the kind to quench their thirst by turning on the tap. 

Korea's traditional table drinks — sungnyung, or scorched-rice water and boricha, barley tea — were all made by boiling. Even after the waterworks began to modernize in the early 1900s, the tap itself came late to most Korean homes: Only 22 percent of Koreans had piped water by 1960 and most were still drawing it from wells or hauling it home. Barely half the country was connected by the mid-1970s, and the supply reached every household only in the 1990s. People drinking straight from the tap has been in the low single digits for as long as the government has been measuring it. 

Paying for water meanwhile, was illegal for many years. Despite Korea's first bottled water hitting the market in 1976, the sales were strictly restricted to United States soldiers stationed in Korea and their families.  

The government outright prohibited sales of water to the general public for fear that doing so would be seen as the government giving up on tap water and that it might create a class system where only the rich would be able to afford clean water. The 1988 Seoul Olympics forced a brief exemption for players and visiting foreigners. When the Olympics ended, water sales died too. 

Despite the government's continued efforts to encourage the use of tap water, however, most Koreans still abided by boiling before imbibing. 

But tap water was not clean

Until the early 1990s, people had reason not to trust it. 

In August 1989, a front-page newspaper report on a government sampling survey declared tap water nationwide contaminated with heavy metals and bacteria. 

An audit report to the National Assembly the following year found trihalomethane, a potential carcinogen, in the country's treated water at up to five times the permitted level. Distrust deepened despite authorities disputed the figures.

The major blow to tap water trust came March 1991, though, when some 30 tons of phenol — a highly toxic and corrosive chemical that can penetrate the skin to cause organ failure and more — leaked from a Doosan plant in Gumi, North Gyeongsang, and contaminated the Nakdong River, the drinking source in the southeast region. 

Then, in 1994, any chance tap water had left evaporated. The Supreme Court ruled on March 8 that the sales ban violated the constitutional right to pursue happiness — both the public's right to choose clean water and the sellers' freedom to do business. The government lifted the ban that same month, and the Drinking Water Management Act followed in 1995, putting bottled, purified and tap water under one quality regime.

Three decades on, those scandals stagnate in the system Korea has today. Purification plants were modernized nationwide and Seoul upgraded all six of its centers to advanced treatment with ozone and granular activated carbon. On the source side, there is little argument left: The utilities say the water is clean and most Koreans agree, according to surveys. 

The faith just slowly fades as it reaches the final mile before the faucet. 

The fear in the pipes 

Seoul's water primarily depends on the Han River, with water drawn from the upstream located north of the city. It is treated at six purification centers, held in underground reservoirs and pushed through miles of mains before it reaches a building — up the riser pipes, often into a rooftop or basement tank and finally out of the kitchen faucet. That final stretch, the part no utility fully controls, is where the anxiety lives.

"The sections managed by the waterworks have improved considerably, but the sections managed by the building owner are another matter, and older buildings tend to have problems of their own," Dankook University's Professor Kim Doo-il, who heads the Korean Society of Water and Wastewater, said. 

And the system is older than the city looks. More than 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) of Seoul's water mains have been in the ground for over 30 years. The buildings too are aging, as 52.1 percent of all structures in Seoul are more than 30 years old. 

Seoul says it knows. Aging pipes are what residents cite most often for avoiding the tap — Seoul Water acknowledged in a written response to the Korea JoongAng Daily.

The city, which has replaced 364 kilometers of old pipes since 2020, is spending 727.1 billion won ($488 million) through 2028 on the most leak-prone stretches, plans another 111 kilometers this year, with some 2,710 still to go. 

Korea is not the only first-world country to face the aging pipes issue. Many major cities like New York and London all feature houses and pipes much older than Seoul. The difference, Prof. Kim argues, is in the mindset. 

"Plenty of people overseas drink their tap water and I don't think that's because their water is necessarily cleaner than ours — they simply trust it more," Prof. Kim argued. 

Such decades-deep stigma galvanized by generations raised to believe something's wrong with the source water and pipe networks is what makes the misperception harder to correct in the short term. 

News every few years of contaminated tap water in specific regions — like Incheon's taps running red with rusty water in 2019, then larvae turning up the following summer — doesn't help.

"Trust builds and builds and then one or two incidents, like rusty water or larvae in the taps, would make people go back right to square one," Prof. Kim said. 

The taste issue 

One complaint survives every effort the utilities have made to sanitize the quality — and perception — of the water supply. Even when the water may be clean, the taste is still a deterrent for some: 13.2 percent of Koreans who avoid the tap say they do it because of the smell of chlorine, the disinfectant that keeps micro-organisms from multiplying as water travels the network. That distinct smell of chlorine is proof that the water was treated — and a signal to avoid it for some. 

The Seoul city government came up with a technology that tries to mitigate the triggering taste by keeping the chlorine level low without compromising the safety of the water.

If the dose is simply lowered, the disinfectant has time to dissipate before the water reaches the tap and leaves the final stretch unprotected. Seoul's patented technology, however, stabilizes chlorine levels across the supply chain instead. 

Another solution to the odd taste is to use a water purifier, as many of Koreans already do. Connected to the main pipes, the water purifier filters the chlorine taste and residuals that might remain in tap water. 

Coway, which first introduced water purifier rentals to Korea all the way back in 1998, acknowledges the chlorinated taste — as well as not being chilled enough — as tap water's core drawback and claims to have fixed it. Their purifiers strip the taste of chlorine and serve it ice cold. 

The company went as far as creating a Water Taste Evaluation & Research Lab, a research arm dedicated to improving the taste of its water. The lab, established in 2019, features 80 researchers and 51 certified "water sommeliers."

Selling the tap

Local governments have been overflowing with work aimed at improving and branding their tap water — and not out of vanity. Tap water is the only drinking water that reaches every home at the same near-zero price and every household that gives up on its pays a premium for the alternative. 

Seoul, most famously, branded its water Arisu in 2004 — "ari," an old Korean word for big, combined with the Chinese character for water, "su." The city bottles it to hand out at public events, runs blind taste tests against commercial brands and even had it certified to ISO 22000, the international food-safety standard for packaged foods — a first for Korean tap water.

The city also installed Arisu water stations across its facilities, with some of its dispensers looking like a water purifier, in an attempt to change the perception of tap water. 

Not just Seoul is doing it. Korea's coastal city of Busan named its tap water Sunsu 365, meaning its pure water is safe to drink every day of the year; Incheon's Haneulsu means its water is from the sky; Daejeon simply calls its supply It's Su and Gwangju's is Bityeoul, meaning "stream of the City of Lights." Ulsan recently launched its Goraesu — whale water.

How is it going? That depends on who is counting.

Last November, the city announced that 75 percent of the people in Seoul drink Arisu, a record high. The figure counts the 56.3 percent who drink tap water at home, straight or boiled, plus another 18.7 percent who do not drink at home but had drunk tap water somewhere at least once in the previous year. 

Ask a narrower question — what is your main way of drinking water at home? — and just 2.8 percent answer tap water straight from the faucet, unboiled, against 39.8 percent who answer a purifier. That number is buried at the end of the report, not something the wider public would see.

Seoul Water was also well aware that merely making the water clean doesn't improve the numbers. 

"Facility upgrades and certifications alone do not complete trust," Seoul Water told the Korea JoongAng Daily in a written response. This is partially answered by the headquarters offering free home testing, now extended to evenings and holidays, where citizens can check the water themselves.

It works on the people who tried it: 81.6 percent of Seoul residents who had their tap tested came away with a more positive view of Arisu. 

And technically, depending on how you see it, water from a purifier is still water from tap water — just filtered one more time. In fact, Paris's official survey counts purifier water — though mostly through a filtration system like Brita — as tap water. In that sense, most of Korea drinks tap water every day. Just not straight from the tap. 

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]