Underground waters have suffered a growing degradation of their quality during the past decades. In most agricultural regions, industrial wastes were less responsible for this degradation than intensive agriculture and cattle raising which did not take into account the impact on the environment.
During thirty years of such an ecological aberration, underground waters and therefore waters supplied to the public have suffered steadily increasing poisonings.
• Nitrates are the most commonly known, the most controversial also. Animal wastes jointly with chemical fertilisers run-offs have polluted the aquifers of entire European regions, making the potable water issue very critical and obliging large populations to drink bottled mineral water.
•The impact of heavy metals is less known but real. It comes from the adjunction into animal feeds, mainly for young pigs, of zinc and copper salts. Most of these metal salts are excreted and are found in the effluents of intensive farms.
• Pesticides have more pernicious effects and until the recent scandals in India about the high levels of pesticides in bottled water, they were relatively absent from the press media. Since the green revolution some 30 years ago, the use of pesticides has been accepted as a routine practice in agriculture in North and South. They slowly percolate through the earth, destroying valuable micro-organisms from the soil and subsoil and contaminating the water tables.
• Chlorine, is used as a sterilising agent to neutralise potential pathogenic micro-organisms, which might be present into the water, prior to or after the treatment. It binds on all organic matters. Its effect on bacteria is always destructive, it does not discriminate between good and bad ones.
• Aluminium, is broadly used to bring about coagulation of suspended solids in the treatment of surface waters to produce drinking water. It is now widely accepted that it is probably one of the main responsible agents for Alzheimer disease. During the early 1990s, European norms for potable water quality, have drastically reduced the tolerated limits of residual aluminium in water. Ferric salts are good alternatives, they do not cause the health inconveniences of aluminium, on the contrary, but vested interests are still in favour of aluminium salts for water treatment.
•Negative subtle information. Teruo Higa, in his book "An earth saving revolution", writes: "What makes water problems so important, is not so much water quality per se, but the information which is recorded and will determine his nature at a given time. Atmospheric pollution and the various contaminants found in the soil have already started to produce information of the worst kind. Transferred to the water, which is acting as a vector, it is this harmful and adverse information which negatively affect environment and health, directly and indirectly".
