Water pollution is an important environmental issue that has complex environmental effects. Generally, emerging water pollutants are subject to environmental concerns due to their unwanted biological activity that has been proven to significantly affect the environment, including changes in water organism behavior, accumulation, and involvement in the food chain systems with a direct impact on humans. Some of the hormones, pharmaceutical substances, and their metabolites, additives such as flame-retardants, heavy metals, and agrochemicals belong to the group of water pollutants. In addition, the new Directive proposal for urban wastewater in Europe demands a mandatory quaternary treatment of micropollutants. The effectiveness of currently employed procedures for drinking and wastewater treatment is over 90%. On the other hand, emerging pollutants are known to be active already at very low concentrations already at trace and/or ppb level. In order to remove and/or deactivate the emerging pollutants from water, different filtration materials have been developed. However, the material resources that are used for that are often based on synthetic materials (membranes, fibrous or particular systems, construction materials) created via
complex and energy-demanding processing technologies of fossil fuels. In addition, detailed and complex assessments can reveal that the preparation and functionalization of synthetic-based materials can even worsen the overall environmental impacts. The BAPUR project aims to develop a novel water filtration system consisting of functionalized bio-based nanomaterials with specific affinity to emerging.
Funding entities and / or coordinator
- AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION
