Researchers Developed Eco Friendly Waste-Water Treatment Process

A research that has been done by a research team led by Dr. Jae-woo Choi and Dr. Kyung-won Jung ultimately developed an eco-friendly process through which just by using a common agricultural by-product, we can easily remove the pollutants from water.

Image Credit: Firstpost

We all know that lots of sewage and waste water is produced from the industrial factories, this sewage or waste water has large amount of pollutants and environmental hormones commonly known as endocrine disruptors. As these environmental hormones do not break down easily, they show negative effects on humans an environment. To be safeguard from these kinds of pollutants and environmental hormones, it’s became necessary for us to discard or remove it as soon as possible. There should be a means of removing environmental hormones.

As per the study published in the journal of Ultrasonic Sonochemistry, the catalyst that is in use currently to remove pollutants from waste water is not much effective anymore. Even the existing process in use to treat the sewage water is costlier. By acknowledging the same, the research team was mainly focused on the development of single substance catalyst, so that the waste water treatment process becomes easy and cheaper to be applied.

Rice Husk is the solution

A research has been done on the development of eco-friendly Nano composite catalyst. The team used rice hulls, it is the hard protecting coverings of grains of rice which is generally discarded after the rice harvesting. By using the rice hulls research team created an eco-friendly and economical product known as biochar.  To create a Nano composite from biochar, its surface was coated with nano sized manganese dioxide.

The biochar and manganese dioxide both are advantageous and hence collectively the nano composite obtained from both is more efficient plus low cost.

Now to check the efficiency of the newly invented process in comparison to the method which was used since long time, they performed a test. In this test they used both the processes in the same conditions and found out that existing catalyst can remove only 80% of environmental hormone whereas the new developed catalyst removed over 95% of environmental hormones that too in less time.

Accordin to Dr Kyung-won Jung, “The catalyst developed through this study makes use of a common agriculture by-product. Therefore we expect that additional research on alternative substances will lead to the development of catalysts derived from various types of organic waste biomass”.