Magnetic oxides for pollutants removal

Abstract

The pollution of oceans and seas by microplastics has become a growing global concern affecting the economy and the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to look for different technologies that can remove these pollutants in a sustainable way. Separating microplastics (MP) from environmental samples is challenging but necessary to determine their environmental prevalence. Current methods are not standardised, and it is unclear to what extent they recover smaller MP. One proposal to carry out microplastic removal is the use of magnetic oxide particles such as copper ferrites (CuFe2O4). The aim is to interact the microplastics with the copper ferrites so that, with the help of a magnet, the microplastics move together with the ferrites due to their magnetic properties. In this work, CuFe2O4 particles are prepared by a coprecipitation method from iron chloride and copper chloride in the presence of octanoic acid (C8H16O2) as surfactant. The structure of the obtained ferrites is determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD), while their morphology is studied using a field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). In addition, the elemental composition of the samples is determined by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). Finally, in order to study the interaction between microplastics and copper ferrites, the surface of the ferrites is functionalized with lauric acid and the composition of the modified surface is determined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).