Scholarly record

PAST USED EMERGENT PESTICIDE REMOVAL EFFICIENCY FROM WATER ENVIRONMENT BY ZEOLITES WITH DIFFERENT GRANULE SIZES

Emoke Dalma Kovacs

Abstract

Pesticide use has shown the efficiency in protection of crops against pests, but also of some unwanted effects as persistence, biomagnification efficiency and impact on non-target organisms. Although their use become more conscientious and restricted in the last decades, they still could be found in different environmental compartments as water, especially due to their physicochemical properties and over use from past. The goal to increase water environment quality, opened the requirement to find optimal and eco-friendly solutions that remove pesticides from it. Zeolites are aluminosilicates with proper cation exchange properties. Use of zeolites as microporous adsorbing material for pesticides removal could be an eco-friendly and proper remediation strategy of water environment. The work proposes to find an optimal solution using eco-friendly material as zeolites, that could remove efficiently from water the past used emergent pesticides. To achieve this objective, zeolites from a natural deposit from Rupea, Romania was used. To assess the removal efficiency of zeolites, the zeolite was tested considering different granule sized (5 ?m, 0.5 ? 1.25 mm and 1.25 ? 3 mm) with target on past used emergent pesticides as hexachlorocyclohexane with related isomers (?-HCH, ?-HCH, ?-HCH, ?-HCH, ?-HCH), and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (2.4-DDT, 4.4-DDT) with related degradation products (2.4-DDD, 4.4-DDD, 2.4-DDE, 4.4-DDD). The experimental assessment of zeolites removal efficiency of targeted pesticides from water was performed considering 12 h and 24 h exposure experiments under different concentration of exposure (1, 5 and 10 ?g?L-1, respectively) based on a full-factorial design with two set of controls. After experiments, both zeolites and water samples were analysed for hexachlorocyclohexane and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane related products, using a gas chromatograph with electron capture detector (GC-ECD). Results have shown a removal efficiency between 57 ? 81 % for primer dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. These removal characteristics depend on zeolites granule size, exposure time and contaminants concentration. However, for corresponding degradation products lower removal efficiency was observed 36 ? 64 % and 22 ? 71 % for DDD and DDE isomers, respectively. Differences in removal efficiency were observed also in case of hexachlorocyclohexane isomers. Usually better removal efficiency was obtained for short term exposure of zeolites (12 h) compared with longer period of exposure (24 h). Based on the obtained results it can be supposed that once zeolites adsorb these chemicals, over time they have also the capacity to release them back. The use of zeolites as adsorbing material for pesticide removal from water could be considered, but improvement of their use requires more studies in this sense.

Publication Impact Profile

• Citations
• CrossRef - Citation Indexes: 1
• Scopus - Citation Indexes: 2

• Captures
• Mendeley - Readers: 2

PLUMX see details

DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2019/5.2/s20.073

Publication details

Back to publication list