BPA removed from water with new treatment method
[Environmental Health News] About 19 billion pounds of bisphenol A (BPA), a known endocrine disruptor, are produced annually worldwide. A commonly encountered chemical in our daily lives, BPA is a known water contaminant that has been detected in effluent, surface water, groundwater, and drinking water.
Water treatment plants struggle to remove BPA from our water supply. But after 15 years of research, chemists from Carnegie Mellon University have developed a method to remove 99 percent of BPA from water with the use of hydrogen peroxide and engineered catalysts, creating large clumps of the chemical that precipitate out of the water and can then be filtered out.
The vast importance of this technological breakthrough is hard to grasp, given the ubiquitous nature of BPA worldwide and the growing evidence showing the serious low-dose toxicity of the chemical.
Researchers hope this method will be applicable to leaching contamination from landfills as well as the removal of other endocrine-disrupting chemicals from water. Results of the study were published in the August issue of the journal Green Chemistry.
