Clean drinking water is still a far cry for billions of people living in rural and developing areas and to find a solution to their problems researchers have been working hard. And finally, after a long research they have come up with a ‘green way’ to clean the dirty water and make it drinkable and, for this purpose, the waste from graphite mining companies is used.
Cleaning water using sand is a traditional method, but, this time, a team of researchers from Rice University in Texas have made some modifications in the method. When sand is coated in an oxide of graphite, it becomes “super sand”. Researchers feel that “super sand” is an effective and quick method of purifying water.
According to the BBC, coarse sand doesn’t purify water as well as fine sand, but purifying water using fine sand is a very slow method. The new method developed by Rice University researchers is both fast and effective. Moreover, the method is cheap and effective as the waste possesses sufficient amount of graphite and can be easily used again to clean the contaminated water.
Researchers believe that this method will help keep people away from water-borne diseases as they’ll be able to consume purified water. While experimenting, the researchers mixed the graphite oxide obtained from the graphite waste from the mining companies with normal sand. They then heated it up to 105 degrees Celsius for few hours and got “super sand”.
According to Rice University, the researchers carried out tests on two different contaminants – mercury and Rhodmine B dye. In the first test, they mixed mercury in 400 parts per billion and ran this water through “super sand”. And the result was that the mercury was removed in an hour and then the super sand got saturated. Similar results were found in the other test too.
Via: Treehugger
