A team of engineers from the University of California Berkeley has developed a mineral-coated sand that can purify contaminated water.

The coated sand material can not only soak up toxic metals like lead and cadmium from water, but also destroy organic pollutants such as Bisphenol A (BPA). The team of researchers responsible for developing the material say this purifying capability means the sand could unlock urban water supplies that were previously unsuitable for human consumption.

A number of the world’s biggest cities have the ability to store excess stormwater underground during periods of heavy rain, which could be harvested during dry periods. However, due to the toxic chemicals picked up on its way through our urban environment, stormwater has generally been treated as waste rather than resource and discarded.

“The pollutants that hold back the potential of this water source rarely come one at a time,” said study lead author Joe Charbonnet in a statement.

“It makes sense that we fight back with a treatment technology that has these impressive double abilities to take out both toxic metals and organics. We suspected that the mineral-coated sand was special, but the way it continues to impress us with multiple capabilities is rather extraordinary.”

The material itself is simply sand particles coated with manganese oxide, a naturally occurring mineral that can physically remove toxic chemicals from the environment by binding with them in a chemical reaction. The UCB research team say the sand could be installed in rain gardens where stormwater is collected and cleaned, before being stored in underground aquifers.

The team has already begun investigating whether the material performs the same at large scale, with large test columns of the sand deployed at sites in Los Angeles and Sonoma. Researchers have deployed large test columns of the mineral-coated sands to treat stormwater at sites in Los Angeles and Sonoma, California.

 

Positive Action

• Much of Australia is currently experiencing drought conditions, making cutting down on water consumption an imperative. Check out our Water Saving Tips for advice on how you can reduce how much water you are using.

 

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Positive Environment News has been compiled using publicly available information. Planet Ark does not take responsibility for the accuracy of the original information and encourages readers to check the references before using this information for their own purposes.