A recent Quebec study shows that a multitude of pesticides can be found in tap water, even after being treated at a water treatment plant.
Sébastien Sauvé, an environmental chemistry professor at Université de Montréal, supervised the study that was published in the June issue of the scientific journal Water Research.
For more than two years, from 2021 to 2023, researchers collected water samples twice a week from the Châteauguay River in Quebec’s Montérégie region.
The samples were collected from the river as water was being pumped into a water treatment plant and were compared to treated water samples leaving the plant for distribution as drinking water.
The river was chosen because it runs through areas of intensive agriculture activity, where pesticides used by farmers eventually make their way from the fields into waterways.
The objective, Sauvé said, was to look at how pesticide concentrations in the water varied over time, as well as before and after processing at a water …