Waste-based materials for environmental remediation Ivano Alessandri 1,2,3 , Irene Vassalini 1,2,3 1 INSTM and University of Brescia, Italy, 2 Department of Information Engineering (DII), University of Brescia, Italy, 3 INO-CNR, Italy For most industrial processes waste is an unavoidable by-product that strongly impacts on their environmental sustainability, safety, social and economic return. For example, almost 1/3 of food produced all over the world is not utilized, generating 1.3 billion tons of waste every year and about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases. Another example is represented by mill scale, an iron rich by-product of casting soaking, reheating, and rolling processes, which is annually generated over 13.5 million tons worldwide. As in the case of food waste, it is underexploited and eventually disposed in landfills. In this presentation, we will show some examples of recovery and reuse of both food and industrial waste for generating new classes of smart multifunctional materials for environmental remediation, in particular water and air purification. The rationale of this approach leverages on the synergistic combination of different units, each one made of waste-based materials, which are able to efficiently capture, detect and remove several classes of environmental pollutants, including pesticides, drugs, heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyls. After introducing the concept of smart bubbles, based on food waste hydrogels incorporating active optical nanoantennas and photocatalysts [1-3] , we will discuss their recent evolution into multifunctional, magnetic composites, achieved by adding iron mill scale, which exhibit very high efficiency in Cr(VI) removal [4] . Finally, we will discuss-for the first time-the case of “photonic sponges” embedding waste-based metamaterials, opening the door to a new, disruptive concept of waste-aided environmental remediation. References 1. I. Vassalini, J. Gjipalaj, S. Crespi, A. Gianoncelli, M. Mella, M. Ferroni, I. Alessandri, Advanced Sustainable Systems (2020) 2. I. Vassalini, G Ribaudo, A Gianoncelli, M.F. Casula, I Alessandri, Environmental Science: Nano 7 (12), 3888-3900 (2020) 3. I. Vassalini, N Bontempi, S Federici, M Ferroni, A Gianoncelli, I Alessandri, Chemical Physics Letters 775, 138674 (2021) 4. A. Boontanom, M. Maddaloni, P. Suwanpinij, I. Vassalini, I.Alessandri, submitted
L23
© The Author(s), 2021
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog