Purify it with food waste
di Francesca Zinghini
10 May 2021 - Drinking water represents only 1% of all water resources on Earth. According to the 2019 United Nations report, three out of ten people in the world do not have it available and goal number 6 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is "to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all -sanitary". Water purification is therefore a particularly urgent issue for environmental protection.
It starts from this need study of Leone Mazzeo, graduate in Chemical Engineering for Sustainable Development and research fellow, which aims to use waste materials for the purification of polluted water. An example of material used in this first work is theMate, an infusion used in the Argentine and Uruguayan tradition. Through tea filters it is possible to remove polluting substances: these wastes are in fact bio-adsorbent, i.e. they eliminate toxic substances from an aqueous solution (specifically, methylene blue, brilliant blue from Remazol and chromium). Adsorption is a low cost and highly efficient method of removing dyes and heavy metals, especially with the use of activated carbon. Once "clean", the water can be reused to feed boilers or to dilute chemical products or for irrigation purposes.
Instead, further biological treatments would be needed to make it drinkable with a view to solving the water scarcity.
