14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the industrial revolution – all-hail to the Rankine cycle –, countless amounts of toxins, ranging from industrial waste to landfills and gas leaks, have been building up in soils and, naturally, making their way into our underground water systems.
Up until now, the favorite method to somehow deal with this issue and clean up a bit both our soils and our groundwaters was to inject various chemical substances straight into the ground, in the hope that reasonable percentages of any of the toxins they happened to come across would be flushed away or destroyed.
However, one professor from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, Dr. Denis O'Carroll seems to have found a much more efficient method to deal with the harmful substances presently lurking beneath the surface of the earth.
Thus, as popsci.com.au informs us, she is planning to have incredibly small particles (nanoparticles, to use the exact scientific term) of zero valent iron pumped in the ground.
It is expected that, when these iron nanoparticles come across various pollutants in the soils and in the groundwaters, the two will ex-change electrons.
More precisely, the pollutant is to give up some of its electrons in favor of the zero valent iron particle, which has none.
Thus, the pollutant is to have its oxidation level changed, and find itself being less toxic than it used to be.
Besides their ability to down-grade toxic waste, the afore-mentioned iron particles pose one other major advantage over traditional soil and groundwater “scrubbers”.
Being so very small, they can make their way through almost microscopic pathways in the soil, which means that they can clean up places that up until this moment remained out of reach.
For the time being, it seems that the nanoparticles discovered by Dr. Denis O'Carroll have successfully passed two trial-runs in Canada, and odds are that it is only a matter of time before large-scale use is implemented.