Used Beer Yeast Could be Simple Solution to Heavy Metal Contamination in Water
upstart writes:
Inactive yeast could be effective as an inexpensive, abundant, and simple material for removing lead contamination from drinking water supplies, according to a new analysis by scientists at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). The study shows that this approach can be efficient and economical, even down to part-per-billion levels of contamination. Serious damage to human health is known to occur even at these low levels.
The method is incredibly efficient. In fact, the research team has calculated that waste yeast discarded from a single brewery in Boston would enough to treat the city's entire water supply. Such a fully sustainable system would not only purify the water but also divert what would otherwise be a waste stream needing disposal.
[...] "We don't just need to minimize the existence of lead; we need to eliminate it in drinking water," says Stathatou. "And the fact is that the conventional treatment processes are not doing this effectively when the initial concentrations they have to remove are low, in the parts-per-billion scale and below. They either fail to completely remove these trace amounts, or in order to do so they consume a lot of energy and they produce toxic byproducts."
[...] Because the yeast cells used in the process are inactive and desiccated, they require no particular care, unlike other processes that rely on living biomass to perform such functions which require nutrients and sunlight to keep the materials active. What's more, yeast is abundantly available already, as a waste product from beer brewing and from various other fermentation-based industrial processes.
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