Drinking water containing antimony

House hold drinking water contains less than the EPA mandated tolerance levels of antimony and nickel. Drinking water is therefore safe. 

The detection of antimony species in drinking water stored in (polyethylene terephthalate) PET containers has been reported by several groups.38,39 As a result most commercially available PET materials typically contain 190-300 (xgg-1 Sb,40 whereby antimony trioxide is a suspected carcinogen. Sb that is leached from the PET containers in drinking waters was observed to be 100 times elevated compared with uncontaminated ground or drinking water... 

The 1993 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation contains standards for 84 chemicals and minerals in drinking water. According to the EPA one of the most prevalent of the listed contaminants is naturally occuring antimony. The maximum contaminant level for antimony and nickel has been set at 0.006 mg/L and 0.1 mg/L respectively. 

One major use of PVC is for pipes in plumbing systems. Here, even though the inexpensive lead stabilizers would be preferred from an economic standpoint, the possibility that the toxic lead could be leached from the pipes into the drinking water necessitates the use of more expensive tin and antimony compounds as thermal stabilizers. Because about one-half of the annual U.S. production of PVC is formed into piping, the PVC formulation used for pipes represents a huge market for companies that manufacture additives, and the competition is very intense. A recently developed low-cost thermal stabilizer for PVC is a mixture of antimony and calcium salts. This mixture has replaced stabilizers containing tin compounds that have become increasingly costly in recent years. 

Antimony, as antimony trioxide (CAS No. 1309-64-4), is used as a catalyst in the manufacturing of plastics especially PET. PET plastic is used in the production of single-use water bottles (Shotyk and Krachler 2007 Shotyk et al. 2006 Westerhoff et al. 2008), carbonated soft-drink bottles (Tukur et al. 2012), juice containers... 

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