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Australian, Chinese Scientists Develop New Way to Extract Clean Energy from Toxic Waste

Nov 01, 2010

A team of Australian and Chinese scientists on Friday announced they have pioneered a new method to make clean energy from land contaminated with toxic waste.

The collaboration between researchers from Australia's CRC for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE), and its offshore partners HLM Asia Group and Shaoguan University of China, on Friday delivered proof of concept for a new system for cleaning up badly polluted land, and produces greenhouse-friendly energy for homes and industry at the same time.

"This is a genuine win-win solution," CRC CARE Managing Director Professor Ravi Naidu said in a statement released on Friday. "We use special plants to extract the toxins from the soil and then we convert the plants to safe, clean energy."

According to the statement, like most industrialized countries, China has a number of sites so contaminated by heavy metals from past industrial or mineral processing, which the only solution was usually to fence them off and abandon them.

It has been estimated that up to one tenth of the country's farming land is affected by industrial pollution, which can also reach consumers via the food chain.

The Australia-China team said the secret lies in a relative of the sugar-cane plant, known as giant Napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum), which is a tall perennial plant that is native to the tropical grasslands of Africa.

Professor Naidu said giant Napier grass was chosen for the project because it grows in extremely poor soils, and it is efficient at drawing heavy metals and other pollutants out of contaminated soil.

The grass has been tested on several large sites in Guangdong province of China, and Naidu said the trials showed the grass was effectively removing metals like copper, nickel and cadmium, as well as high concentrations of zinc and lead.

"The grass has a fairly high sugar content and is therefore used to generate ethanol through a fermentation process," Naidu said.

The grass will now be tested at other locations in China, and the team is also looking into trials on polluted sites in Egypt.

Meanwhile, the CRC CARE-China partnership was also working on a project to remediate red mud, the waste product from alumina processing which is causing a major disposal headache worldwide.

"Both China and Australia are big aluminium producers so solving the problem of disposing of millions of tonnes of red mud produced each year is a national priority," Naidu added. (Xinhua)

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