At Carnegie Mellon University, those researchers have now come up with a plan that may help alleve the increased prevalence of pharmaceutical pollution in our rivers. Using a novel TAML catalyst and hydrogen peroxide, the researchers were able to cleave a significant cross section of typical drug molecules at low concentrations, providing an affordable, sustainable solution for replacing conventional effluent treatment approaches.
Tackling the Invisible Threat
From antibiotics and hormones to antidepressants, pharmaceutical drugs are making way into our rivers, lakes, and even in our drinking water sources. And now researchers warn, that this ‘invisible pollution’ threatens wildlife behavior and ecosystem health on a global scale, millions of years before the environmental damage will become apparent at species level or through depletion at higher levels in the food chain.
These methods often do not completely remove these micropollutants, who find their way into our delicate water resources. Now the Carnegie Mellon researchers have taken this issue into their minds and came up with a breakthrough solution which might change how we are going to control this increasing environmental problem.
The Remarkable TAML Catalyst
The key to this advanced approach is the TAML catalyst, an artificial, molecular-scale analog of certain peroxidase enzymes found in nature. Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Green Science over the course of a decade, the TAML catalyst has proven to be quite adept at scrubbing out many different types of micropollutants from urban wastewater.
The latest form, NewTAML, fundamentally pushes this technology to another level. In laboratory tests, they showed that very small quantities of a NewTAML catalyst combined with low amounts of hydrogen peroxide were able to inactivate a mixture of six representative pharmaceutical bioactive called micropollutants, including antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs. Sequentially, the TAML/peroxide system proved also to be highly effective in remediation of ebastine (moist air), DEA (hospital influent) and paraxanthone (laboratory sewage) over the highest applicable range including spiked municipal wastewater and river water, respectively >98 % of the drugs/ 5 mg L −1 became undetectable from [ ]) within six hours.
Making this innovation even more striking, the system operates more efficiently as the concentration of TAML catalyst is reduced. Due to this characteristic of catalyst, the entire process can operate using far smaller amounts of TAML and hydrogen peroxide — which translates into lower operating expenses and potentially a more cost-effective solution for many communities.
Conclusion
The research of the Carnegie Mellon group has created a revolutionary way to cleanse our bodies of pharmaceutical pollution, which is effective in treating TAML (Peroxide). By offering the only truly inexpensive, responsible and high quality solution available to us, this innovation has the ability to fundamentally change what we do to tackle this profoundly important environmental problem, enabling a cleaner and healthier future for all life in our waters; human communities need them.
