I've been wondering how much to worry about fertiliser contamination of wild water. There are a lot of good light weight ways to treat water nowadays, I have a brown bag filter to get rid of most of the junk, and arguably that with boiling or water purification tablets is about as good as it easily gets...
...and if one is high up, I see relatively little to worry about beyond that, but coastal areas, or anywhere low compared to surrounding farm land, one is surely going to be subject to quite a lot of fertiliser chemicals if nothing else, and any streams and rivers will always be lower than a lot of surrounding land so it's pretty much always a problem. I've seen rivers with horrendous algae and other growth problems and I understand this to be down to fertiliser run off from the land and it really brings it home how real the problem is.
The only way I understand we can really deal with such chemicals is activated carbon, but it appears to me from observing the how fast activated carbon removes chemicals that activated carbon filters which all operate by water flowing over/through the activated carbon, will inevitably only ever reduce contaminants.
Unless one passes water through such filters many times therefore, or sits water in such a filter, are they going to have more than a marginal effect? Will they have a sufficient effect for our purposes of filtering water from rivers and streams surrounded by intensive farming?
These are questions I'm not sure about and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has ideas on the subject.
I understand of course that we are inevitably afflicted with some chemical intake, even drinking safe tap water there will be some, but we all accept tap water as acceptable, but what is acceptable in the wild and how do we get there?
M.