Environmental Health News, Week 12: Cleaning Polluted Water with Peat

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In northern Minnesota, a company called American Peat Technology has reported a new way to potentially clean up polluted water, specifically water polluted with heavy metals. This is all done with something called peat. Peat is a type of decomposing plant material. There is a large amount in Minnesota, and the process to clean water is cheap and does not require any fancy technology. Minnesota has been using this method to extract mercury and sulfates from their water. American Peat says that peat is reusable and the University of Minnesota Duluth has worked to refine the process. Urban Accessories in Washington state purchased the peat to clean up copper polluted run-off -- according to Dan Jones, the company's safety and environmental compliance manager, they simply stuffed women's tights with peat and the copper was absorbed from the water into the peat. The cost was $400.

The use of peat sounds promising. If it truly can help clean polluted water, then we should utilize this method. It is cheap, natural, and reusable. These methods are necessary in our society today in order to protect our health whilst also being sustainable.

Reference
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/04/06/minnesota-peat-filter-toxic-heavy-metal-contamination

Comments

  1. Ashley SubramaniApril 10, 2018 at 9:59 AM

    Hello Loren,

    I hope that peat is as good as it sounds. We are constantly looking for fast and cheap methods to clean up water, and this may be a solution for it. As we know, water is greatly needed. Having the ability to clean up the water we have can have an impact of reducing water scarcity.

    -Ashley

    ReplyDelete

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