Pesticides and Residues in Different Media with Especial Regard to Waters in Hungary

Abstract

Agriculture practices using chemicals endanger soils and drinking water supplies worldwide. But, without chemicals, most agricultural systems cannot meet the requirements of our modern world. In soils, pesticide residues accumulate due to soil water retaining capacity. But after a time, pesticides eventually appear in surface waters and groundwater (Solymosi, Definition of concentration of pesticide agents with different SPE methods out of groundwater and surface water, PhD thesis, Veszprém, 2006). Regular water quality monitoring and the reduction of pesticide use are recommended in river catchment areas, and especially in the catchment of those surface and subsurface waters, which are used as source water for drinking water supplies. Low level contamination of drinking water sources may occur, especially in intensive agricultural areas, even though there is regular water qualitymonitoring, and occasionally it can contaminate the finished drinking water as well (Vágvölgyi, Introduction toHU-SRBcalls and support system: an example of the BIOXEN project, Hungary - Serbia IPA Cross - border Co - operation programme: Bioxen, Development of xenobiotic - degrading bioaugmentation products, http:// www2.sci.u-szeged.hu/microbiology/BIOXEN/indexhu.html, 2011). Our aim was to give a comprehensive picture on the average yearly occurrence of pesticides and pesticide degradation products in Hungarian drinking water supplies. Data of 3 years were analyzed, using the Hungarian Drinking Water Quality Database of National Institute of Environmental Health (NIEH). In 2008-2010, up to 2 % of all drinking water samples analyzed for pesticides per year were above the limit values. The main limitation of the monitoring and data interpretation is the low number of pesticides measurements, a large proportion (about 89 %) of the water supply zones were not analyzed for pesticides in this period. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013.