Nitrophenols are pollutants that are found in wastewater treatment plants and are made by humans. This pollutant is toxic but very useful to manufacturers who use it to make dyes, fungicides, and pharmaceuticals. My father works at a wasterwater treatment plant that processes waste from municipalities and he said that nitrophenols are processed by a separate industrial wasterwater treatment plant. One method of processing nitrophenols has two-steps: first, the nitrophenols are mixed with hydrogen peroxide and iron salts and the byproduct of this step is iron sludge. This sludge requires a secondary cleanup in order to reduce its harm to the environment. Another limitation of this process is that the first step requires an acidic environment. Based on our lecture on Friday, this process is economically-demanding and an improvement would eliminate the second step and simultaneously reduce environmental damages.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon discovered a method that works at natural pH and uses a fraction of the iron, an economic advantage. Part of the Fe-TAML (iron tetra-amido macrocyclic ligand) group of catalysts, this solution works with hydrogen peroxide on some of the dyes and pesticides and does not require the secondary cleanup. In the end, the catalysts break down into elements in the environment, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Thus, this is a "green" process and this is the first time researchers have used Fe-TAMLs to process nitrophenols. Researchers also believe that Fe-TAML use can be extended to paper bleaching and improving detergents. For more on this, please visit http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/829/3 for the reference article.
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This is a great a discovery by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Usually providing more environmentally friendly products means increasing the cost of production, but this discovery might mean that companies will be able to reduce pollutants without being finacially burdened. Much praise goes to Anindya Ghost who is credited with the discovery of this use of Fe-TAML.
Carnegie Mellon is a five minute jog from my family's house in Pittsburgh. My dad works there as well (and my mom used to work there). Our discussion in class got me thinking... one summer I took a chemistry class at CMU and used the chemistry labs. I was wondering if they were the new PVC-free labs. I'm pretty sure that it was before they built them. The labs I was using were pretty old and likely riddled with PVC.
It's so wonderful that your post provides an introduction to our assignment in class today about the new method Terrence Collins came up with to bleach paper without producing so much pollutants. According to the article we read in class the new process is able to carry out reactions at ambient temperature which results in energy savings. It also does not produce harmful biproducts such as dioxins. I'm not surprised that Collins won the "Presidential Green Chemistry Award" and I bet he is really wealthy now that this process could be patented. I bet money along with validation are strong driving forces for scientists to come up with new methods to protect the environment.
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