© РИА Томск. Павел Стефанский TOMSK, Nov 9 – RIA Tomsk.
Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) have synthesized a new
material that decomposes a dangerous agricultural pesticide
paraxon-ethyl in water; such a catalyst can be obtained from plastic
waste, for example PET bottles, the university's website said.
Earlier
it was reported that the university's scientists were working on
functional waste recycling. For instance, they have invented a way to
create a sorbent to remove imidacloprid, a chemical used in agriculture,
in particular, to control insects from water. The sorbent belongs to a
class of promising materials: metal-organic frameworks (MOF). TPU
chemists used PET bottles to produce the frameworks.
"The
essence of the methods is to directly obtain products with high added
value from secondary sources, bypassing the stages of additional
processing. Earlier we had already synthesized efficient sorbents for
insecticides from them, but we decided to go further and make a material
that could not only accumulate ecotoxicants, but also decompose them", –
the university press service quotes the leader of the scientific group
Pavel Postnikov.
The report specifies that the material is
pellets from bottles (or PET) on which scientists have grown
metal-organic frameworks of zirconium ions, also included silver
nanoparticles.
"Metal-organic frameworks and materials
using them are good sorbents, a very promising area. They work as traps
for certain molecules. But often their catalytic activity is
insufficient. To overcome this barrier, we decided to use the effect of
plasmon resonance", – the press service quotes one of the researchers Oleg
Semyonov.
As explained in the report, this effect occurs
at the surface of metals when irradiated with light, and appear
quasiparticles plasmon, which affect the chemical transformation.
Experiments by scientists have shown that in one hour the material can
decompose about 95% of paraxon-ethyl in high concentration solutions.
This exceeds the efficiency of already known catalysts.