One part industrial waste and one part orange peel and voila!
A team of Australian researchers may have come up with a very environmentally promising material—made out of discarded
industrial waste and orange peels. Max Worthington and Justin Chalker stumbled upon a material, made out of these unlikely components, that is able to remove mercury from water.
Developers Max Worthington and Justin Chalker, from South Australia’s Flinders University, said until now there had been no such method.
It’s a huge step for the pair, with mercury being a dangerous pollutant that can damage food and water supplies, affect the human nervous system and was especially poisonous for children.
Synthetic chemist Dr Chalker said the best thing about the material was that it was incredibly cheap and relied on products that were already being discarded.
Mercury in drinking water is a
health issue and an environmental issue. What Worthington and Chalker have discovered could have
truly positive ramifications.
“We take sulphur, which is a by-product of the petroleum industry, and we take limonene, which is the main component of orange oil, so is produced in large quantities by the citrus industry, and we’re able to react them together to form a type of soft red rubber, and what this material does is that it can grab mercury out of the water,” Dr Chalker said.
He said they conducted toxicity studies to make sure that the polymer itself was not harmful to the environment.
With the
levels of mercury in our oceans on the rise, any solution is welcome, and an inexpensive one is just that much more exciting.