H Two the Izzo

It was World Water Day a couple of days ago, and thus we are all reminded of the importance of a substance that is part of just about everything on this planet. We here in the U.S. are pretty lucky to have mostly clean water. Sure, Ann Arbor has been known to have a little arsenic in its water, and the Gulf Coast had a massive oil leak that affected it. In other countries, it's the norm to have water supplies polluted by lead, arsenic, and other harmful metals.

Because of this reminder, I wanted to share the following article about how banana peels (and other natural foods) can actually clean heavy metals out of water better than some of the commercial products.

The article is here:
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/banana-peel-can-purify-water-say-scientists.html

And abstract:

This article reports on an investigation into the ability of minced banana peel to extract lead and copper ions from water and the parameters involved in this process. The kinetics of copper and lead uptake reached equilibrium in 10 min and the extraction of metals ions was favorable above pH 3. The medium was characterized by FTIR, which showed absorption bands of carboxylic and amine groups at 1730 and 889 cm1, respectively. The adsorption isotherm fitted by Langmuir’s model showed maximum adsorption capacities of 0.33 and 0.20 mmol g−1 (or 20.97 and 41.44 mg g−1) for Cu(II) and Pb(II), respectively. Minced banana peel was applied in the preconcentration system and showed approximately 20-fold enrichment factor and the column was reused for 11 cycles without loss in the percentage of recovery. The proposed method was applied in the determination of Cu(II) and Pb(II) in a sample of raw river water and was validated by comparison with a standard reference material.