“…Despite these considerations only a few studies have been developed to completely understand the phenomenon of copper release from water distribution pipes, and, therefore, the knowledge of the problem is still fragmentary. The most important researches concern the effect of stagnation time (Merkel et al, 2002;Lytle and Schock, 2002) and water composition on copper release (Edwards et al, 1996;Broo et al, 1999;Edwards et al, 2002;Shin and Kim, 2004;Pehkonen et al, 2002), or deal with the possibility of predicting and mitigating the assumption of copper from drinking water (Broo et al, 1997, Lagos et al, 1999Xiao et al, 2004, Kirmeyer et al, 2004. Obtained data usually show a direct proportionality between copper concentration in stagnating water and stagnation length, at least for short stagnation periods, as for stagnation periods longer than 48 h the process seems to reach a plateau (Merkel et al, 2002).…”