Hi everyone! I\’m part of the duo that won the first prize in the Italian competition \”I giovani e le scienze\” and I\’m so grateful for the opportunity to join the SJWP.
Tell us what the water concern in your country is!In Italy, we use a huge amount of water due to agricolture and other industrial processes, and in my opinion there's the need to develope new solution in order to increase the water quality and to waste less.
This is what I think is one of the solutions for a sustainable future:We all have to do something for our future, we can't waste time anymore. Everybody has to do some small gestures in order to waste less, reduce consumes and recycle precious materials. In my opinion, if we start to change our lifestyle, we could manage to change even the actions of industries and multinationals.
SAP2 (Sustainability Analysis of Purification with SAPonite)
The goal of our project was to develop an experimental solution to environmental pollution and to analyze the sustainability of the process. We used a synthetic clay named Na-SAP-20, a mineral which possesses ion exchange properties which allow it to recover heavy metals and other pollutants from bodies of water. The method we developed was tested on Co2+, a material recognized as ‘critical’ due to its uses in a range of industrial, sustainable and technological applications, and on Cr3+ which is a common polluting agent found in freshwater. The material absorption capacities have been analyzed by spectrophotometry UV-VIS, ICP-MS and NMR-relaxometry; we compared the results obtained with these analytical techniques focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of each one.
