What are pesticides?
The term pesticides comes from the English word for pests. Pesticides are chemical substances developed by humans to kill organisms or at least to inhibit them in their growth and their spread. The effect of pesticides can vary widely. Pesticides can, for example, impair the permeability of cell membranes and thus prevent nerve conduction, or they disrupt the transmission of signals at synapses. Furthermore, pesticides can inhibit not only growth but protein synthesis in general, or even shut it down completely. Pesticides are often classified according to their target organisms as herbicides (against plants), fungicides (against fungi) or insecticides (against insects). In the way they work, however, pesticides harm not only nature. It has been scientifically proven that even in the tiniest amounts they can also harm us humans and act like nerve poisons. Pesticides can cause neurological and cognitive disorders, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, reproductive disorders and certain forms of cancer.
How do pesticides get into our drinking water?
Our agriculture uses pesticides on a large scale to protect its yields from enemies and losses. Every year, several thousand tons of them are used in Germany. Private users aren't entirely innocent either: hobby gardeners and rose growers are just as happy to reach for the little chemical helpers from the supermarket. So a real toxic cocktail comes together on our fields and gardens, with in some cases more than 100 substances. Heavy rainfall then washes these herbicides, fungicides and insecticides off the fields into surface waters (rivers, streams and lakes) and into the springs. From there, the toxins then enter the cycle, with frightening consequences, because pesticides have a long memory. The highly dangerous weed killer atrazine and many other substances banned long ago or only recently, along with their breakdown products, can still be found in groundwater today. According to the current report by the Federal/State Working Group on Water, the metabolite of tolylfluanid, which was only discovered in 2006, can still be found at around 1,500 measuring stations.
What can you do about pesticides in drinking water?
Pesticides are molecular contaminants of drinking water. They are smaller than microplastics, smaller than bacteria and even much smaller than viruses. This makes it extremely difficult to remove these substances efficiently from the water. Both our wastewater treatment plants and our waterworks are unable to remove pesticides from the water. They aren't set up for it either, because awareness of the harmful effect on the human organism has only emerged in recent years. On top of that, the cost question also plays a role: hardly any municipality wants to afford an expensive, state-of-the-art water treatment plant and have it constantly maintained by trained staff.
There are a few well-known and scientifically verified methods for removing pesticides from drinking water. One example is the use of highly porous activated carbon. Activated carbon has an immensely large specific surface area (comparable to a sponge) and has the property of binding numerous chemical substances on its large surface. Activated carbon is therefore built into the water flow in such a way that as much carbon as possible is surrounded by the water and the water spends as much time as possible in contact with the activated carbon (so-called contact time). This binds the pesticides firmly to the activated carbon and removes them efficiently and in a targeted way from the water flow. Activated carbon is a natural product. In the case of drinkpure the activated carbon built into the filter is obtained from the remains of coconut shells. This allows drinkpure to reduce the pesticide content in drinking water by over 90%, even at inlet concentrations that are 20 times above the limit. Here's the pesticide test report.
DrinkPure also filters other substances out of the water. Here you'll find an overview of what DrinkPure can filter.