Water pollution - 30 News

Biosurfactants might offer an environmentally friendly solution for tackling oil spills

Biosurfactants are produced by microorganisms and can increase the bioavailability of oil components

25-Jul-2023 - Can biosurfactants increase microbiological oil degradation in North Sea seawater? An international research team from the universities of Stuttgart und Tübingen, together with the China West Normal University and the University of Georgia, have been exploring this question and the results have ...

PFAS contaminated water becomes clean again

Promising and environmentally friendly process developed

25-Jul-2023 - There are many man-made environmental pollutants. One of the most serious is pollution with the harmful perpetual chemical PFAS, which can be found in many soils and waters and thus also in our food. Although it is possible to remove it, it is costly and produces hazardous waste. Now, researchers ...

Microplastic pollution: some lakes are worse impacted than oceans

Researchers surprised by extent of pollution

14-Jul-2023 - Microplastics are found in lakes and reservoirs around the world. Pollution reaches even the most secluded places where human influence is minimal. Moreover, concentrations of microplastics in freshwaters are sometimes higher than in subtropical gyres, the marine areas where large amounts of ...

AI systems for the airborne detection of plastic waste in the oceans

06-Jun-2023 - Aircraft that routinely fly over bodies of water around the world to monitor pollution could in future not only detect oil and chemical spills on the high seas, in coastal waters and on beaches, but also plastic waste floating on the surface of the water. In the PlasticObs+ project, a consortium ...

Jellyfish-like robots could one day clean up the world’s oceans

27-Apr-2023 - Roboticists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed a jellyfish-inspired underwater robot with which they hope one day to collect waste from the bottom of the ocean. The almost noise-free prototype can trap objects underneath its body without physical ...

New wood-based technology removes 80% of dye pollutants in wastewater

Method can also be used against other types of pollutants

31-Mar-2023 - Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new method that can easily purify contaminated water using a cellulose-based material. This discovery could have implications for countries with poor water treatment technologies and combat the widespread problem of toxic ...

Microplastics deposited on the seafloor triple in 20 years

First high-resolution reconstruction of microplastic pollution from sediments obtained in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea

28-Dec-2022 - The total amount of microplastics deposited on the bottom of oceans has tripled in the past two decades with a progression that corresponds to the type and volume of consumption of plastic products by society. This is the main conclusion of a study developed by the Institute of Environmental ...

A sea change for plastic pollution: new material biodegrades in ocean water

Marine microorganisms found to feast on new polyurethane materials used in a startup's sustainable shoes

26-Sep-2022 - Plastics, now ubiquitous in the modern world, have become a rising threat to human and environmental health. Around the planet, evidence of plastic pollution stretches from grocery bags in the deep sea to microplastics in our food supplies and even in our blood. Seeking solutions to counteract ...

New method can remove dyes from wastewater

16-Aug-2022 - North Carolina State University researchers have demonstrated that a synthetic polymer can remove certain dyes from water, and that the polymer can be recovered and reused. The findings offer a new potential method for cleaning wastewater after use by textiles, cosmetics or other ...

Final destination deep sea: microplastics impact ocean floor even more than assumed

The deep sea serves as the “oceans’ garbage dump” – and it is surprisingly dynamic when it comes to deposition

15-Jul-2022 - Senckenberg researchers Serena Abel and Angelika Brandt, together with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute – Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and Goethe University in Frankfurt, have investigated microplastic pollution in the Western Pacific Kuril-Kamchatka Trench. ...