9/27/08
Nanomaterials remove harmful chemicals
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Overuse of pesticides in agricultural and horticultural crop production causes environmental problems harming human, animal and plant systems. It is reported that about 2.5 million tons of pesticides are used on crops each year and the worldwide damage caused by pesticides reaches $100 billion annually. Further during application only few percentage of pesticides has been effectively used, and many of them either been washed away into soil, revers causing pollution of soil, water resources and fishes or remained on the fruit crop surfaces affecting human health. Removing such residues has been a problem. Now many solutions are available to solve this problem using nanotechnology.One such product is by using oil-in-water microemulsions developed at Institute of Chemistry in China as a green nano-pesticide delivery system to replace the traditional emulsifiable concentrates (oil), in order to reduce the use of organic solvent and increase the dispersity, wettability and penetration properties of the droplets. Another product is using gold and silver nanoparticles loaded on alumina to remove pesticides often found water supplies such as endosulfan, malathion and chlorpyrifos. The mechanism is that endosulfan adsorbs on the nanoparticle surface and upon interaction for a long time, the nanoparticles precipitate from the solution. Interaction with silver is weak, yet adsorption occurs leading to removal of endosulfan from the solution.
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