Cleaning up oil spills 

Cleaning up oil spills 

What has happened?

A chemical compound (Meisenheimer complex) synthesised through a simple, single-step process of mixing two chemicals at room temperature has been found to be highly effective in removing fluoride and metal ions such as lead, mercury, cadmium, copper, and iron from drinking water.

USP of the compound

• The compound repels water by nature
• The compound has negative and positive charged parts and this helps it absorb metal ion pollutants and fluoride from water
• One gram of the compound was able to remove a large amount of lead (817 mg) and mercury (830 mg) from water and nearly half its weight of copper (451 mg) and iron (511 mg),

Testing successful

• Sponge became water-repelling: A polystyrene sponge that absorbs water became a water-repelling material when coated with the compound and was able to absorb a wide variety of oils and organic solvents from water
• Efficiency against metal ions: To test the compound’s capacity to remove metal ions below the World Health Organisation’s limit, the researchers used the compound to treat water containing five ppm of copper, mercury, cadmium and iron. After 10 minutes of treatment, the concentration levels of the metals dropped to below 2 parts per billion (ppb), which is far below the WHO limit for these metals
• Efficiency against fluoride: In the case of fluoride, water with a high concentration of fluoride (10 ppm) was treated with the compound. After 10 minutes of treatment, the fluoride concentration dropped to 10 ppb.