Mango peels hold secret to
clean oil pollution: Australian study
CANBERRA, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Mango peels hold the solution to
cleaning up oil spills in an environmentally friendly fashion, an Australian
study has found.
The study, released on
Wednesday by the University of South Australia, found that an extract from the
mango's skin can break down toxins in oil sludge through oxidation, leaving
only decontaminated soil and dissolved iron.
Biruck Desalegn Yirsaw, the
project's lead researcher, said that he created nanoparticles using mango peel
that had been dried, crushed, boiled and filtered, and mixed them with iron
chloride, then successfully removed 90 percent of the toxins from contaminated
soil.
The extract also removed 99
percent of toxic chromium from contaminated water, presenting a sustainable and
environmentally-friendly solution to oil spills.
Contaminated soil is currently
either broken down using boron hydride or left contaminated.
"With mango peel being
such a rich source of bioactive compounds, it made sense that zerovalent iron
made from mango peel might be more potent in the oxidation process,"
Yirsaw said in a media release on Wednesday.
"As we discovered, the
mango peel iron nanoparticles worked extremely well, even outperforming a
chemically synthesized counterpart by removing more of contaminants in the oil
sludge," he said.
"Our research uses the
waste part of the mango -- the peel -- to present an affordable, sustainable
and environmentally friendly treatment solution for oil sludge," he said.
"And while the world
continues to be economically and politically reliant on oil industries as a
source of energy, working to remediate the impact of oil pollution will remain
a serious and persistent issue," the release read.
The Australian Mango Industry
Association (AMIA) has endorsed the product, saying it would "certainly
support the development of uses of mango by-product that may come from
processing mangoes."
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