Cleaning polluted water or soil from hazardous substances is time- and cost-intensive. Up-to-now the contaminated medium (water, soil) needs to be removed from the environment, cleaned, and then brought back into the original system. If a clean-up is not possible, the water or soil needs to be treated as waste, and is either burned or dumped in landfills. Here nanomaterials offer two advantages: (1) They can be directly introduced into the contaminated environment and (2) the removal of contaminants is more effective due to the higher reactivity of the nanomaterials.
Examples for these kind of applications have been intensively studied in the BMBF-funded projects Fe-NANOSIT, NanoSan and NAPASAN.
