Nano-material is the future technology for countries around the world that is equipped to tackle the toughest of environmental challenges that the mankind face today, but it needs to be harnessed quickly and made mainstream

The world today faces environmental problems and challenges of staggering proportions. With every passing year, threats to ecological biodiversity of the planet are multiplying. As countries scramble to find effective solutions, it is quickly emerging that traditional practices for conserving the environment and the time-tested methods of preventing pollution may not prove to be successful in getting the desired results.

Nanotechnology and nanomaterial-driven pollution control strategies are rapidly emerging as a small, but ultra powerful source of solutions for todays vexing environmental problems. First explored for applications in microscopy and computing, nanomaterial made up of units that are each thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, are emerging as useful tools for tackling threats to our planets well-being.

Nano-material is increasingly forming the foundation of eco-friendly technology that can capture carbon dioxide from air and toxic pollutants from water and degrade solid waste into useful products. Scientists, researchers and innovators are relying on this technology to slowly but steadily mitigate climate change process. Thanks to the amount of research and development in this sector, nano-material are now not only dependable and recyclable but also efficient catalysts. These features have spurred a bevy of technical innovations in which nano-material plays an integral and pivotal part.

For instance, in order to slow down the concerning increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and also mitigate climate change, researchers have developed Nano CO2 harvesters that can absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide and deploy it for industrial purposes. For instance, alcohol is a useful by product of CO2 extraction from the atmosphere using Nano CO2 harvesters.

Nano-material is simple chemical catalysts which is photochemical in nature that works in the presence of sunlight. But this technology still has a long way to go before it becomes a widely accepted mainstream solution. Nano-particles offer a promising approach to this because they have a large surface-area-to-volume ratio for interacting with CO2 and properties that allow them to facilitate the conversion of CO2 into other useful substances.

The challenge is to make them economically viable, and in pursuit of the same, researchers have tried everything from metallic to carbon-based nano-particles to reduce the cost, but so far they havent become efficient enough for industrial-scale volume application. But research in this area is slowly but surely yielding results.

One of the recent progresses made in this area is by research conducted by scientists of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Indian Institute of Petroleum and The Lille University of Science & Technology, France. In this project, researchers developed a Nano CO2 harvester that used water and sunlight to convert atmospheric CO2 into methanol, which can be employed as an engine fuel, a solvent, an anti-freeze agent and a diluent of ethanol. Made by wrapping a layer of modified graphene oxide around spheres of copper zinc oxide and magnetite, the material looks like a miniature golf ball and is capable of capturing CO2 more efficiently than conventional catalysts and can be readily reused.

Similarly, nano-particles can also be used to cleanse water from pollution created due to toxic dyes used in textile and leather industries. The dyes from tanneries tend to leach into natural sources of water like deep tube wells or groundwater and, if wastewater from these industries is left untreated, it creates a problem that is rather difficult to solve.

An international group of researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland have established that nano-material can be widely used for removing heavy metals and dyes from wastewater. The absorption processes, using materials containing magnetic nano-particles, are effective and can be easily performed because such nano-particles have a large number of sites on their surface that can capture pollutants and dont readily degrade in water.

Using the same concept, appropriately designed magnetic nano-material can be used to separate pollutants such as arsenic, lead, chromium and mercury from water. In addition to removing dyes and metals, nano-material can also be used to clean up oil spills. Researchers at the Rice University in Houston, Texas, have developed a reusable nanosponge that can remove oil from contaminated seawater. Apart from this, nanomaterial can also be effectively used to manage organic waste, which can pollute land and water if not handled properly. Farms and food industry generate humongous amounts of biodegradable waste. One of the oldest methods to treat biodegradable waste is to dump it into tanks called digesters.

These are full of anaerobic microbes that consume the material, converting it into bio-gas fuel and solids that can be used as fertilisers. But anaerobic digestion is slow. Nano-particles can accelerate the anaerobic digestion of the sludge, thus making it more efficient in terms of duration and enhanced production of the biogas.

Nano-material is the future technology that is equipped to tackle the toughest of environmental challenges that the mankind face today, but it needs to be harnessed quickly and made mainstream.

(The writer is an environmental journalist)

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Nanotechnology, climate change and pollution - Daily Pioneer