Kraft lignin: a novel alternative to oil spill cleanup recycling industrial waste

Oil spills occur frequently due to negligence or through acts of vandalism or war. Marine oil spills damage marine, coastal, and ter¬restrial habitats, as well as impact coastal economies. In order to palliate such issues, researchers are working to develop cost ef¬fective and environmentally safe methods of adsorbing oil from oil spills. In this paper, a complex chemical compound found in the secondary cell walls of plants and ex¬tracted as a waste product of the pulping process known as kraft lignin was tested as an adsorbing material for oil spills. Lignin is light, and its high surface energy and wet¬tability allow it to interact with charged oil droplets. It was found that lignin can absorb 80% of the carbon introduced into water by oil spills within 12 hours of treatment. This study demonstrates a novel method for resolving oil spills using kraft lignin. After it is saturated with oil, lignin can be inciner¬ated, and its high calorific value can be used to produce energy from what would other¬wise be a waste product.Les fuites de pétrole sont produites fréquemment à cause de la négligence, des actes de vandalisme ou de la guerre. Les fuites de pétrole en mer en¬dommagent les écosystèmes maritimes, côtières et terrestres, et affectent les économies côtières. Pour atténuer de tels problèmes, les chercheurs tentent de développer des méthodes rentables et écologiques pour absorber le pétrole des fuites. Dans ce rapport, un composé chimique compli¬qué trouvé dans la paroi cellulaire secondaire des plantes et extrait comme produit résiduaire du processus de réduction en pâte, connu sous le nom de lignine ‘kraft’, a été testé comme matériel absorbant pour les fuites de pétrole. Les pro¬priétés de la lignine, y compris sa légèreté, son énergie de surface élevée et sa mouillabilité, la permettent d’interagir avec les gouttes de pétrole chargées. La lignine est capable d’absorber 80% du charbon introduit dans l’eau par les fuites de pétrole en 12 heures de traitement ou moins. Cette étude démontre une solution originalepour l’absorption du pétrole des fuites pétro-lières. Après avoir été saturée avec le pétrole, la lignine peut être incinérée, et sa valeur calori-fique élevée permet la production d’énergie à partir de ce qui aurait été autrement gaspillé

Molecularly imprinted polypyrrole sensors for the detection of pyrene in aqueous solutions

Recently, electrochemical sensors have emerged as tools for polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) detection that are cost-effective, easy to produce and use, highly selective and sensitive, and with good reproducibility. Polypyrrole may be easily produced from polymerization of pyrrole, by chemical as well as electrochemical methods, to produce dimensionally stable semi-conductive polymer materials, under mild synthesis conditions. In this study, polypyrrole was used as the stable molecular framework within which to create an imprint of the desired polyaromatic hydrocarbon, in situ, at glassy carbon electrodes. The molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) sensors were washed to remove the imprint and subsequently characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and cyclic voltammetry (CV). The MIP sensors were then applied to the detection of pyrene and non-imprinted polymers (NIP) sensors were also evaluated for comparison with the MIP sensors. Calibration curves obtained for the detection of the pyrene at the MIP sensors in aqueous media reported limits of detection (LOD) of 2.28 × 10−7 M for pyrene and limit of quantification (LOQ) of 6.92 × 10−7 M (n = 3). The sensitivity of the MIP sensors (32.53 A/M) determined from the slopes of the calibration curves reported twice the value measured for NIP sensors (14.48 A/M)