2019 | Bangladesh | Md. Shahriar Hasan, Didarul Islam,

A Novel Approach for Purifying Contaminated Drinking Water using Carbon Aerogel Electrodes Synthesized from Thermoplastic Waste

Water issue adressed: Too dirty
“If we could produce fresh water from salt water at a low cost, that would indeed be a great service to humanity, and would dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.”-John F. Kennedy

The major emphasis of this study was to develop rapid, portable and highly-effective water purification device via capacitive deionization for on-spot water remediation with minimal energy consumption. The single-pass filtration experiments conducted at 1.2 V through the gravitational force demonstrated that the electrode fabricated from PET carbon aerogels and mixed plastic carbon aerogels is superiorly efficient by eliminating approximately 100% and 93.53% of both NaCl and As (5+) contaminants ions across a wide range of feedstock concentrations (50-1000 ppm) respectively, where the reverse osmosis system was proven relatively ineffective. This interdisciplinary study opens numerous possibilities for generating potable and affordable water when the access to electrical power is inadequate with protecting the ecosystem from the consequences of thermoplastic debris problem.

This is how I came up with the idea for this project:

Bangladesh is suffering from the devastating contaminated groundwater aquifers and plastic waste crisis for the past few years. Growing up in such a tragic situation from childhood it always triggered us to think more about environmental issues and develop a solution to tackling these problems.

CONTACT WATERTANK

Ania Andersch

Programme manager ania.andersch@siwi.org +46 8 121 360 59