Heavy Metal Recovery from Industrial Wastewater Using Nanostructured Photocatalysts

There is an increasing need for an innovative technology for low cost recovery and recycling of heavy metals found in industrial wastewater streams. Target heavy metals include elements such as chromium, nickel, cadmium, lead, copper, and zinc. Existing wastewater treatment technologies such as bioremediation can neither biodegrade heavy metals, nor can they decontaminate them. Other conventional alternatives such as ion-exchange and precipitation are too expensive to be commercially viable and they create another hazardous waste. This program seeks to explore, develop and commercialize an alternative technology with the potential of profitably recovering and recycling heavy metals. The proposed technology is based on photocatalyzed redox recovery of metals over nanosized catalysts. The proposed technology has many desirable features: photoreduction on nanocatalysts is fast and works with solar energy; the use of nanocatalysts significantly enhances the process efficiency; the nanocatalysts can also simultaneously and completely mineralize organic and non-metallic pollutants that may be present in the wastewater (broadband treatment agent).