Zeolite Cotton in Tube: A Simple Robust Household Water Treatment Filter for Heavy Metal Removal

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 4719
• Main Authors: Chen, Xutao, Yu, Lisha, Zou, Shihui, Xiao, Liping, Fan, Jie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 13.03.2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/301; 704/172/169; Copper; Cotton; Disinfection; Drinking water; Flow rates; Heavy metals; Humanities and Social Sciences; Lead; Metal concentrations; Metal ions; multidisciplinary; Purification; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Water pollution; Water shortages; Water supply; Water treatment; Zeolites
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-61776-8

It is challenging to develop a low-cost household water treatment (HWT) that simultaneously deliver an effective and robust way for safe and reliable water supply. Here, we report a simple flow-through filter made by zeolite-cotton packing in a tube (ZCT) as low-cost HWT device to remove heavy metal ions from contaminated water. The zeolite-cotton is fabricated by an on-site template-free growth route that tightly binds mesoporous single-crystal chabazite zeolite onto the surface of cotton fibers. As a result, the ZCT set-up with optimized diameter achieves both high adsorption efficiency, proper flow rate, reliable supply and strong stability at the same time. After flowed through the set up packed with 10 g of zeolite-cotton, 65 mL 1000 ppm Cu 2+ solution was purified down to its safety limit (<1 ppm). Notably, their efficiency remains unaltered when filtering several ions simultaneously. In a simulated purification process, 8 L of water contaminated by Cu 2+ , Cd 2+ and Pb 2+ could be transformed into drinking water and it enables the removal of heavy metals to concentrations of below 5 ppb (μg L −1 ). We also show that the ZCT can be used for disinfection by introducing Ag-exchanged zeolite-cotton without contaminating the water with Ag ions (<0.05 ppm).