The Ultimate Star Filter® and heavy metals
🌍 Discover the essentials about heavy metals in drinking water and how the Ultimate Star Filter® effectively removes them for healthier water.
- Natural and industrial sources
- Health and environmental hazards
- Metals monitored: lead, mercury, cadmium
- Strict European standards
- Ultimate Star Filter®: proven effectiveness on 16 heavy metals
Definition
Heavy metals, or trace metals, are a family of specific metals. The European definition, proposed in 2000, stipulates that any compound containing antimony, arsenic, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, tellurium, thallium and tin is classified as a heavy metal. To these are added materials in metallic form, if they are classified as hazardous substances.
Origin
They come partly from natural sources (mostly volcanic) but also from human activity, through industry (metallurgy and chemical sectors) and transport.
Hazards
Released in large quantities into the air, soil and water by human activity, these contaminants play an important role in the contamination of ecosystems. As they are neither biodegradable nor degradable, they end up concentrating in animals at the top of the food chain, such as certain seabirds, cetaceans and predatory fish (tuna and salmon, to name but two). Plants are also affected by bioaccumulation. Humans are also greatly affected through their consumption of contaminated products.
Directive 2004/107 states that ‘Scientific evidence shows that arsenic, cadmium, nickel and certain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are genotoxic carcinogens for humans and that there is no identifiable threshold below which these substances do not pose a risk to human health.’
Presence in water
Depending on the pH, hardness, temperature and pressure of the water, there may be a risk of heavy metals becoming soluble in water. However, even without this potential solubilisation, many heavy metals are found in water in trace amounts. This may be due to natural (rare) or industrial pollution, but also, for certain heavy metals (lead, copper, zinc), to the degradation of drinking water pipes.
The danger comes from the fact that some heavy metals are highly toxic, even in very small doses. They accumulate in the body over long periods of time, as they are not biodegradable and are difficult to eliminate naturally by the human body.
Today, three heavy metals are subject to special health and environmental monitoring because they are highly toxic and their bioaccumulation remains a serious concern. These are cadmium, mercury and lead.
Standards
Regulatory thresholds are set at European level. They define, for each particle, thresholds below which these heavy metals are not dangerous to humans. However, these limits do not take into account the cocktail effect or the accumulation that occurs in the body.
The Ultimate Star Filter® gravity water filter and heavy metals
When designing our Ultimate Star Filter® gravity water filter, we targeted several dozen pollutants to test, including those likely to be found in drinking water and posing a potential health risk. Among these pollutants, we identified a list of 15 heavy metals, including the most toxic ones: cadmium, mercury and lead. To this list we added antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, bismuth, copper, iron, manganese, nickel, selenium and zinc.
As recommended by NSF® Standard 53, tests were carried out at specific pH levels (6.5 and 8.5) for a number of them because they do not behave in the same way in acidic and alkaline environments. Others were carried out at a pH of 7.5. These analyses at different pH levels are essential to prove the true effectiveness of a filter on heavy metals.
Our filter has proven effectiveness on all heavy metals.
Star Water Filter®
The technical content published on this website is written and validated by the Star Water Filter® technical team.
It is based on independent laboratory analyses, performance data from the Ultimate Star Filter® and experience gained in the design and use of gravity filtration systems.
