We had our annual board meeting of our housing cooperative yesterday where we decided to start planning the renovation of our water piping. After the meeting I started doing some research on the subject, specially about the material of the pipes.
While there are a couple of options to reuse the existing pipes with different techniques I think the better option is to get completely new pipes. For that there is also a couple of options, mainly whether having them made of copper or plastic.
The former one is the traditional, copper has been used for ages in water pipes and their good and bad sides are quite well known. Plastic on the other hand is relatively new material to be used on water piping (it has been more widespread for "only" a few decades).
Searching for bad things for either option led to quite a rabbit hole. There were a lot of "information" against both of them - how copper is poisonous in itself for humans and how much chemicals can dissolve into water from plastic. It was quite hard to find neutral comparison between them, only those that exaggerated the potential threats of either one of those.
In the end I managed to find a few neutral articles made by public actors like health officials which pretty much said that: yes , there might be some health effects with both, but they are mostly negligible and that both are considered safe options for everyday use.