An oil spill is one of the worst pollution accidents that can happen in coastal areas. Unfortunately, such accidents are all too frequent and the clean-up work usually turns out to be both expensive, ineffective and harmful to wildlife.
Now a team of scientists led by Northwestern University in the United States has developed a powerful sponge that can absorb thirty times its weight in oil without absorbing seawater.
When the sponge is saturated with oil, you can simply wind it up, without any loss of effect, and use it again.
See how the sponge soaks up oil without being weighed down by water:
Can be used 25 times
At the heart of this fortunate invention is a magnetic, oil-absorbing and water-repellent nano-coating placed on a standard sponge. The carbon-based coating includes a myriad of tiny holes that trap oil while allowing water to easily pass through.
The coating makes the sponge powerful in this way, because it is able to separate oil and water by itself.
The holes hold the oil until the sponge is squeezed and the process can be repeated a total of 25 times, making the sponge much more useful than many other cleaning tools.
It is possible to apply a nano-coating to all sponges, which in this way acquire superpowers. They only need to be dipped in the coating and dried before they can be used. In this way, the method will be cheap and easy to adjust the size to the extent of the work.
As a result, scientists believe they have made a very important discovery, not only for cleaning up oil spills, but also for developing similar sponges that could be used to absorb other unwanted particles from the air or sea.
Not harmful to animals or the environment
The new oil sponge could soon become a sustainable alternative to other cleaning methods known today, which include chemical degradation, oil burning, flotation on the sea surface and the use of absorbents.
Chemical degradation poses a danger to wildlife, combustion releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, emulsification is impossible in rough seas, and sorbents are costly and non-reusable.
The new sponge, on the other hand, is cheap to produce, reusable and separates oil and seawater without harming wildlife or the environment.
