Application of Nanotechnology for waste management: Challenges and limitations

摘要

Nanotechnology is currently applied in several technology and industry sectors, such as medicine, energy, food safety and electronics and thus in many everyday life applications. In addition, nanotechnology is also one of the most important emerging trends also in environmental protection industy and particularly in waste management. This technology employs materials with at least one dimension less than 100nm, so called nanomaterials. Owing to their size, nanomaterials demonstrate increased reactivity for adsorption, oxidation/reduction and catalysis of several contaminants groups, such as heavy metals (e.g. chromium), organics (e.g. chloroethenes) and inorganics (e.g. nitrate).