New Method Helps Purify Contaminated Water

A new method to purify water and green nanotechnology simply involves shaking a vial of water and oil, according to a recent study.

Researchers found that shaking up oil and water helps in trapping the nanomaterials, which can be easily removed.

"These materials are very, very tiny and that means if you try to remove them and clean them out of contaminated water, that it's quite difficult," Dongyan Zhang, a research scientist at Michigan Technological University, said in a news release--adding that techniques like filter paper or meshes often don't end up working.

Tiny nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires and other nanomaterials, unfortunately, end up making their way into our water. In fact, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than 1,300 commercial products use some kind of nanomaterial and right now, we don't really know what this impact could have on our health.

The good new news, the study states, is that this new process clears out close to 100 percent of nanowires, nanosheets, nanotubes and more. However, it did not work on zero-dimensional nanospheres at this time. They were too small to grab, researchers say.

The study is published in the American Chemical Society's journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.

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