Mesostructured Adsorbents for the Removal of Heavy Elements from Water

According to EPA estimates > 30,000 U.S. sites require remediation, due in part to heavy element contaminants. In addition, the EPA, which recently set the MCL for arsenic in drinking water at 10 ppb, estimates that ~ 350,000 people in the US drink water containing > 50 ppb of arsenic and nearly 25 million drink water containing >25 ppb arsenic. In addition to the cost of meeting the needs of industry for waste water management, the drinking water contamination problem alone will generate a $17 billion global market for household tap water filters, according to estimates provided in 1999 by Proctor and Gamble Co. (Marguerite Nugent, Reuters, Cleveland, 1999). These filters rely primarily on the use of activated charcoal for the removal of biological, organic and, to a limited extent, inorganic contaminants. However, charcoal alone is not sufficiently effective in removing toxic cations and anions. A much more efficient trapping agent needs to be incorporated into the charcoal to efficiently remove species such as mercury, lead, arsenite, and arsenate ions. A key part of our near-term business plan is to fill this niche, in part, by providing through basic research studies, low cost, high performance organofunctional mesostructured silica (OMS) and aluminosilicate (OMA) trapping agents.