Green materials for environmental remediation

We have synthesised porous materials using green chemistry, which were tested for water decontamination, removal of VOCs, and carbon capture. These new materials developed are environmentally-friendly, lower cost and produced faster than those currently used providing impact on cost and sustainability. Firstly, nitro-aromatic compounds, common water pollutants, were removed by chemical conversion. Batch experiments were conducted in order to determine the reaction kinetics and a rate model. Secondly, removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) was targeted. The results provide substantial evidence to suggest that the novel materials have the potential to replace existing chemical adsorbents. Finally, we demonstrated the use of green adsorbents for carbon capture, where our results show that these materials compete with the best performing materials reported in the literature such as chemically impregnated materials and physically impregnated silica. A wide range of characterisation techniques were employed to correlate the structure and performance of these new materials.