The quality of New York City water has long been of, well,consuming interest. Lately, however, trendsetting developers likeDouglaston Development, the Durst Organization, Extell Development,Rockrose, Rose Associates and Silverstein Properties have takenmatters into their own hands by specifying central water filtrationsystems for their new buildings here. Some builders are going evenfurther by equipping kitchens with high-end filters to obviate theneed for bottled water. The Helena, a 600-unit, LEED gold-certifiedMidtown residential property built by Durst and managed by RoseAssociates, was the first local project to feature twice-filteredwater. If this trend takes off, it will certainly have positiveenvironmental implications.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, more than 60million plastic bottles are discarded every day—and that's just inAmerica. Demand for bottled water has grown so rapidly that eventhe best efforts at recycling cannot keep up. A dozen years ago,two out of five bottles were recycled; by 2005, the number hadfallen to one out of six. When you think about the environmentalimpact of manufacturing and distributing bottled water in the firstplace—every bottle sold in Manhattan must be trucked in—the casefor water filtration becomes crystal clear.

If you asked most New Yorkers 20 years ago, water was simplywater. But the city's demographics and the prevailing mindset ofits residents have changed dramatically. Today, the averageresident cares deeply about quality-of-life and environmentalissues, and water is increasingly high on the list of suchconcerns. Not too long ago developers told me that they thoughtinstalling a filtering system implied something was wrong with thewater. Few people think that way any longer. Filtration is nowproperly seen as an enhancement, not a corrective. People havebecome comfortable with multiple grades of water quality, appliedto different purposes. There doesn't need to be one universalstandard of water for everything from drinking to flushing atoilet.