The influences of iron characteristics, operating conditions and solution chemistry on contaminants removal by zero-valent iron: A review

Making Fe0-Based Filters a Universal Solution for Safe Drinking Water Provision

“…For IITB-like filters, 10 kg of iron nails are needed; 10 kg of iron nails every five years is certainly affordable. However, 'iron nails' is not a well-characterized class of Fe 0 materials [92,115,116]. This makes the transferability of results achieved with IITB filters difficult.…”

“…Adsorptive filtration has proved to be the least expensive treatment option for many water treatment applications [16,52,147,148]. Research over the past three decades has demonstrated the suitability of Fe 0 filters to quantitatively remove a wide variety of pathogens and toxic chemicals [17,25,53,71,116,119,142,[144][145][146]149]. Its suitability on a specific application depends on costs as they relate to the amount of Fe 0 consumed.…”

“…However, advice and knowledge transfer can be acquired in collaboration with other groups, including scientific ones. Considering the significant advancements made in research on 'Fe 0 for environmental remediation and water treatment' over the past three decades [26][27][28][29][30]52,76,116,146,[222][223][224][225][226][227][228][229] as the cornerstone for a universal sustainable solution to a long-lasting crisis, the universal provision of safe drinking water is no longer an 'elusive goal' [7]; Fe 0 filtration provides a solution, specifically for the developing world [229,230].…”

“…However, this result is only qualitative as different iron nails would show different results and there is no tool to correlate the obtained results to those of Smith et al [229]. During the last 20 years, sporadic efforts to characterize the intrinsic reactivity of Fe 0 materials have been presented [83,84,90,91,93,94,115,116,224]. However, only the methods of Reardon [90] (H 2 evolution) and Noubactep (Fe 0 dissolution in EDTA) [84] are really simple and affordable.…”

Metallic iron for water treatment: leaving the valley of confusion

“…In this context, Fe 0 is currently regarded as (1) a reductant for some species, (2) an adsorbent for other species, (3) a coagulant for various anionic species (Richardson and Nicklow 2002;Noubactep 2010a;Shrimpton et al 2015;Lu et al 2016;Sun et al 2016;Xu et al 2016) and (4) a long-term supplier of Fe 2+ for activation of oxidation processes (Liang and Guo 2010;Segura et al 2015;Lee et al 2014;Lin et al 2016). The properties making Fe 0 suitable for environmental remediation include: (1) its readily availability and (2) its environmental friendliness implying the generation of non-toxic hydroxides and oxides.…”