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Effective Removal of Microplastics Using a Process of Ozonation Followed by Flocculation with Aluminum Sulfate and Polyacrylamide
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Researchers tested a two-step water treatment process combining ozonation with flocculation to remove microplastics. They found that ozone pretreatment roughened the microplastic surfaces and added chemical groups that dramatically improved removal rates, from 40% to 91%, during the subsequent flocculation step. The findings suggest this combined approach could significantly enhance microplastic removal in conventional water treatment plants.
The widespread use of plastics in our daily life has caused many health problems. Conventional water treatment processes have low efficiency in the removal of microplastics from water. In this work, we investigated the efficiency of ozonation pretreatment followed by flocculation to remove microplastics from water. After the ozonation pretreatment, it was found that microplastic removal could be significantly enhanced by flocculation from 40% to 91%. The characterization results show that the ozonation-pretreated microplastics had rougher surfaces and larger amounts of surface hydroxyl groups and carbonyls, which might be responsible for their increased removal. However, there was still a small amount of microplastics that had not been removed. They floated on the surface of the solution and could not be effectively oxidized by ozone, thus not changing their surface properties. This further confirms the importance of hydroxyl groups.
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Researchers systematically tested coagulation and flocculation for removing microplastics from drinking water, finding that removal efficiency depended strongly on plastic particle size and whether particles had been weathered, with smaller pristine particles being the hardest to remove.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.