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Project

Evaluation and Environmental Impacts of Modified Photocatalyst/Waste-by-Product Composite in Removing Ciprofloxacin from Aqueous Solution

Residents in Vietnam are faced with an increased concentration of organic pollutants (e.g., humic acids, fatty acid, phenol, persistent and toxic pesticides,  pharmaceuticals, drugs, dyes, personal care products, etc) and heavy metals (e.g., As, Cu, Cd, Fe, Mn, Ca, Mg, etc) in water supply sources (reports from Ministry of Natural Resources & Environment, 2013) is caused by agricultural, industrial,  domestic and medical wastewater (in which domestic waste accounts for over 30% of the total direct discharge into rivers, lakes or canals lead to the river) (National environmental report, 2012). Only a small number of people in urban cities use tap water, mostly used directly or through a simple conventional treatment system (e.g., coagulation; flocculation; sand, gravel filtration, etc). Drinking of
untreated contaminated water constitutes a significant transfer pathway of contaminants from the environment into humans and causes negative impacts such as illness, poverty, and further water conflicts. Yet efforts to provide safe drinking water have overlooked water quality aspects, probably
due to the high costs for construction, operation, analytical equipment and maintenance water treatment plant. It is necessary, therefore, to take further steps to remove organic matter and heavy metals by low cost-high performance water treatment system. Decentralized systems are thought to be a good approach to water treatment in terms of sanitation and environmental protection in Vietnam because of a lack of infrastructure and finance. The decentralized
concept is based on a simple premise that water should be treated (and reused, if possible) as close to where it is generated as is practical. This treatment system is very useful and easy to apply to areas where there is no clean water (rural or mountainous areas), where there are no centralized water
treatment plants (industrial areas and has high-density residential areas), where disasters, earthquakes and floods happened.
However, the decentralized approach has the intrinsic challenge of requiring more advanced methods than conventional large-scale plants, because there is no dilution effect and a wide range of contaminants has to be taken into account. Therefore, the decentralized water treatment in a waste-to-product approach, which uses suitable waste sources from local regions to produce adsorbents for the removal of organic matters in water, is a good strategy due to their excellent capacity to remove several contaminants. It has several potential merits compared to existing low-cost methods (i.e., sand filtration, boiling, solar disinfection, chlorination).
Moreover, this approach minimizes waste, use energy efficiently, helps to safeguard the environment and public health, while at the same time accelerating a positive change for both urban and rural areas in Vietnam. 

Objectives:
The main goal is to improve the quality of water supply by removing pollutants by decentralized water treatment system by waste-to-product approach

The specific objectives are:

1. Utilization of one-time use food container products and agricultural wastes as adsorbents

2. Assessment of the organic matter removal capacity and regeneration of the adsorbents

3. Setting up and evaluation of decentralized water treatment system using adsorbents to remove organic matter in water sources in Northern Vietnam

4. Life cycle environmental impacts of the chemicals used to modify and regenerate materials 

Date:1 Oct 2018 →  19 Aug 2022
Keywords:adsorption, Nguyen Thuy Linh KU Leuven
Disciplines:Catalysis and reacting systems engineering, Chemical product design and formulation, General chemical and biochemical engineering, Process engineering, Separation and membrane technologies, Transport phenomena, Other (bio)chemical engineering, Sustainable and environmental engineering, Analytical chemistry, Macromolecular and materials chemistry
Project type:PhD project