Oil wastewater and spilled oil caused serious environmental pollution and
damage to public health in the last years. Therefore, considerable efforts are
made to develop sorbent materials able to separate oil from water with high
selectivity and sorption capacity. However most of them are low reusable, with
low volume absorption capacity and poor mechanical properties. Moreover, the
synthesis is time-consuming, complex and expensive limiting its practical
application in case of emergency. Here we propose an innovative approach for
the fabrication of porous PDMS starting from an inverse water-in-silicone
procedure able to selectively collect oil from water in few seconds. The
synthesis is dramatically faster than previous approaches, permitting the
fabrication of the material in few minutes independently from the dimension of
the sponges. The porous material evidenced a higher volume sorption capacity
with respect to other materials already proposed for oil sorption from water
and excellent mechanical and reusability properties.This innovative fast and
simple approach can be successful in case of emergency, as oil spill accidents,
permitting in situ fabrication of porous absorbents
