Bifunctional catalytic composite material for oxidative wastewater treatment

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Many industries such as food production, breweries and agriculture produce large amount of effluents that contain organic contaminants which need to be removed before disposal. This requires lengthy and time intensive processes with a large cost (£12 billion worldwide for the relevant industries). Approximately 3 -- 5% of electricity produced is used to clean water. We have developed a catalytic composite material that can utilise air in order to clean industrial wastewater by consuming the organic material within this water. The principle is analogous to a catalyst for automotive exhaust cleaning. Compared to current technologies based on microbes, our material is insensitive to the external conditions, such as temperature, pH and composition, does not require any energy input or incubation times and can continuously be operated without any regeneration step. It is therefore an excellent solution to decrease the cost of water treatment for effluents not suited for other waste-to-energy technologies. Our composite materials and product design will simplify current wastewater processes making them more flexible, resilient, efficient and safe. The energy saved for wastewater cleaning has the potential to save millions of tons of CO2 from getting into the atmosphere, thus helping to mitigate climate change. During this project we will optimise the material and investigate its processing into innovative products.