Eco-Friendly On-Site Water Analyses for Ultra-Trace Harmful Ions

Governments in developed countries specify water quality standards to be applied in their own countries. Recently the allowance values of harmful metals are getting tighter for environmental water and industrial wastewater throughout the world. For example, World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the criterion value of 3 ppb for cadmium for protection of human health, furthermore, governments of some countries provide the wastewater standard for zinc for conservation of aquatic life. High-performance analytical instruments such as AAS, ICP, and ICP-MS have been employed as official analytical methods of ultra-trace elements. Besides the costly initial and running expenses and the material and energy consuming of the instruments, specific technical skills and long analytical time are required for sample pre-treatment. Therefore, simple yet highly sensitive and eco-friendly on-site methods have been demanded for quick judgment of industrial and environmental water in developed countries as well as evaluation of drinking water in developing countries.

Analysis of Lipids Produced by Microalgae Isolated from the Area around Okinawa, Japan

Petroleum reserves have been decreasing in recent years and microalgae are attractive as a potential source of new biomass petroleum. Microalgae are unicellar microscopic algae and most species microalgae produce lipids. In particular, Botryococcus braunii produces large amount of lipids found with nearly 70% on the basis of the dry weight. This chapter reviews high lipid-producing microalgae found from Okinawa area around National Institute of Technology, Okinawa College (NIT, Okinawa). The microalgae collected were isolated on an AF-6 agar plates, and incubated in AF-6 medium. The fatty acids were extracted from the algae, converted into fatty acid methyl esters, and analysed by GC/MS. As a result, two microalgae strains were identified that the produced fatty acids was loaded in the algae with nearly 20% in the dry weight base. In addition, these two microalgae strains produced palmitic acid as nearly 40% of the total produced lipids. Therefore, the two microalga strains isolated are potentially and highly efficient for the organisms applied for the production of biodiesel fuel.

Clay Minerals Converted to Porous Materials and Their Application

Clay minerals can be used as raw materials for the production of various industrial products. However, most bentonite and kaolinite deposits contain a significant quantity of non-clay mineral impurities. These impurities often affect the quality of clay minerals for adsorption and catalytic application. Therefore, in order to be used as adsorbents and catalysts, those clay minerals need some beneficiation, activation processing to improve their properties or conversion to a porous materials. In this chapter, an overview of the current state, the properties, the beneficiation, activation as well as the conversion of bentonite, kaolinite… to porous materials such as pillared clays, zeolites and their intended applications were presented. In addition, in this review, the challenges and difficulty in the conversion of bentonite and kaolinite to porous materials were also discussed.

Inorganic-Organic Composite Materials from Liquid Natural Rubber and Epoxidised Natural Rubber Derivatives

Organic-Inorganic composite materials (OICs) are used to describe the group of materials synthesized from polymers and inorganic metal alkkoxides. The interests in these materials arised from the need to ‘combine' the physical properties of inorganic glass materials and polymers such that the resultant OICs have the strength of the inorganic glass and flexibiliy of polymeric materials. Sol-gel technique have been the technique of choice due to much of its advantages, in particular the low temperature reaction. This is very important when natural rubber and its derivatives are used as the polymer component of the OICs. Work in our laboratory has demonstrated that OICs form liquid natural rubber (LNR) and 50% epoxidised natural rubber (ENR-50) can be prepared from various metal alkoxides, such silicon, zirconium and titanium. The OICs can be prepared as flexible transparent films, nanofibers and nanobeads. This Chapter will describe the preparation techniques and the properties of these OICs from various compositions of one and more metal alkoxides in both LNR and ENR-50. The applications of these materials in PANI will be briefly described.

Introduction of Environmental Materials

Advances in environmental materials are described especially concerning about utilization of natural source and their waste, for example biomass and their re-uses. They strongly support development to sustainable society. So, these classify and demonstrate environmental technologies, which strongly contribute to overcome pollution environment for the purpose of sustainable society. In view point of green chemistry and the related technologies to representative biomasses and inorganic wastes are applying for advanced functional materials. Since biomass and inorganic wastes are very interesting candidates for regenerated materials, it is very meaningful to understand and attention to environmentally and friendly materials and technologies. This is because that an increasing environmental concerns to sustainability.

Metal Ion Separation with Functional Adsorbents and Phytoremediation Used as Sustainable Technologies

The amounts of “Electronic wastes” including heavy metals are increasing day by day. Such waste is in the rich resource of various metals having the precious metals. Therefore, these wastes are considered as urban mine, if people successfully can separate them to each source. In sustainable viewpoints, separation technologies applied for such electronics waste are essential and important to efficiently recover various metals at a low concentration from these sources. This chapter reviews functional adsorbents made of polymers, ionic liquid, and dendrimer. Also, membrane technology is introduced as separation toll for heavy metals. Among them, topics of phytoremediation are made as an effective sustainable method, utilizing certain plants to clean up the environmental contaminants. Here, plants are able to remove harmful chemicals such as metals, which are present in the soil, when their roots absorb water and nutrients from the contaminated soil, sediment and surface, or ground water. The contaminants are removed by trapping them into harvestable plant biomass. Furthermore, cleanup methods of environments and recovery of precious and rare metals are mentioned for sources of urban and submarine mines with low cost and high recovery efficiency.

Poly (Lactic Acid) Generated for Advanced Materials

The consumption of plastic products from petrochemical feedstock has increased sharply resulting in plastic waste problems while raw materials from fossil fuels tend to decrease rapidly. Researchers and the plastic industry have since proposed a sustainable solution through the development of bioplastics. Ideally, bioplastics which are synthesized from renewable bioresources normally render biodegradability in appropriate conditions. Polyester, one of the most diversely used synthetic polymers today, is an ideal choice for biodegradable polymers due to the relative ease of breaking ester linkages. Poly(lactic acid) or polylactide or PLA which is a thermoplastic polyester with many advantageous properties, for instance, environmentally friendly, biocompatibility, processability, and high chemical resistance is now available in the plastic market as a promising bioplastics. However, the cost of PLA is still much higher than that of general commodity plastics. In order to make PLA commercially competitive, advanced and innovative applications should thus be explored. In this chapter, technological background of PLA production as well as its economic situation is firstly reviewed. Then, the enhancement of PLA properties to suit advanced applications is illustrated. Some polymers used for blending with PLA along with some fillers utilized for the production of PLA composites are described. The chapter concludes with the degradation mechanism of PLA and the standard test methods.

Bacterial Cellulose

Bacterial cellulose, synthesized by bacteria, is one of the most highly pure cellulose sources. It has gained a great attention due to its unique properties. With molecular similarity to cellulose derived from plants, bacterial cellulose can be modified based on diverse techniques established for the plant-derived cellulose. Modification of cellulose has become one of the major areas of cellulose research to provide cellulose-based materials with novel properties. The progress in cellulose science has also opened up more potentials for bacterial cellulose. This chapter describes an overview of biosyntheses, modifications, and applications of bacterial cellulose.

Study on the Use of Biomass Polymer Sheets in Water/Alcohol Pervaporation as a Sustainable Source of Alcohol Energy

This chapter presents an overview of the study of cellulose sheets used as a bio-membrane in water/alcohol pervaporation for a variety of purposes in order to offer an environmentally sustainable, renewable, low-energy use and economical alternative. Particular interest is the utilization of readily available biological materials such as cellulose and chitosan to create biomass polymer membranes for the environmentally responsible and sustainable process of reclaiming alcohol from alcohol/water mixtures through the use of cellulose in the pervaporation process. This process is a promising and innovative alternative to the more energy intensive, environmentally destructive methods and materials currently used.

Natural Rubber and Rubber Blend Nanocomposites

Natural rubber (NR) is representative biomass polymer and the effective uses are strongly contributed to sustainable society. This chapter presents the innovative and advanced rubber nanocomposites with polystyrene-encapsulated silica nanohybrids (PS-nSiO2) subsequently used as a nanofiller for NR and NR/styrene butadiene rubber (NR/SBR). The PS-nSiO2 were prepared via ‘in situ' differential microemulsion polymerization. The core-shell nanohybrids of PS-nSiO2 were achieved with an average diameter of 40 nm using a smaller amount of surfactant, compared to microemulsion polymerization method. Moreover, the effects of the NR and NR/SBR filled with PS-nSiO2 nanohybrids on the mechanical properties, thermal stability, flammability and morphology are also discussed. The results indicated that the encapsulation of nSiO2 with PS can provide not only the well-dispersion of nanoparticles in the rubber matrix but also the synergistic properties of two components from the polymer and the inorganic nanoparticles by improving mechanical properties, thermal stability and flammability of rubber nanocomposites.