The increasing pollution of natural sources of drinking water encourages the development of new emerging technologies and processes for water remediation. This work deals with the study of catalytic reduction of contaminated waters containing nitrates (60 ppm) in a continuous reactor working at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and using hydrogen as reducing agent. Optimal proportions of Pt-Cu and Pd-Cu in bimetallic catalysts on activated carbon, obtained by wetness impregnation, have been found. Besides, novel catalysts obtained from copper nanoparticles doped with Pd or Pt and supported on activated carbon, have also been studied. For all catalysts the Pt-Cu pair seems to be more selective in the transformation of the nitrates ions to nitrogen compared to Pd-Cu pair. Furthermore, considering the noble metal amount, the bimetallic nanosphere catalysts are more active (between 20 and 50) than the impregnated ones. The catalysts have been characterized by hydrogen chemisorption, BET, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis. During the reaction, a considerable amount of the noble metal in its oxidised form has been detected. Based on this result an additional step to the generally accepted reaction mechanism of the nitrate reduction has been proposed. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.