Exclusive rights to commercialise the Nano-Composite Arsenic Sorbent (N-CAS) technology that will improve the ability to remove arsenic from contaminated water supplies were signed to Water Technology Group Inc of Harvard, USA, by the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory on 30 January 2009.
The technology is said to be seven times more effective than current arsenic-removal technologies.
A winner of both an international competition for the R&D 100 award and a Nano-50 award, N-CAS contains high concentrations of arsenic adsorbing nanoparticle metal oxides embedded in a strong composite polymer matrix.
In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency standards reduced the maximum allowable concentration of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb creating an expensive dilemma for 4,000 American municipalities and nearly 14 million homeowners, whose water resources now exceed the new limits. N-CAS will provide an economical method to treat water supplies and meet these new standards.