The Clean City
More than anything else, careful use of resources will determine whether the city of tomorrow is a success or a failure. Evonik products help cities to conserve water during the treatment process and to recycle plastics efficiently.
Many metropolitan areas with a million people or more are already reaching their breaking point as they face the increasing challenge of providing drinking water for a rapidly growing population. As a result, intelligent concepts for purifying and distributing this vital liquid are at a premium.
Peroxides such as hydrogen peroxide and peracetic acid already play a key role in treating wastewater and preparing drinking water. As a powerful oxidizing agent, PERACLEAN® peracetic acid grade rids water of any existing microbes. CLARMARIN® hydrogen peroxide grade plays plays a valuable part in the process of treating industrial wastewater, as it eliminates organic trace elements that are difficult to break down and that can pose a problem when treated wastewater is returned to surface water. These two peroxides also have a clean environmental record: the only by-products of their use are water and, in some cases, acetic acid, which is readily biodegradable.
Supplying resources is not the only issue city planners face—waste disposal can also be a tough problem. This is precisely the reason why recycling limited resources and closing material loops are so important.
Evonik already has solutions for improving processes like plastics recycling, which is an area particularly susceptible to unpleasant odors—not just during the recycling process itself, but also later on in the products manufactured from the recycled material. The TEGO Sorb® line of odor absorbers can help here. One ingredient in these products, castor oil, contains active agents that capture foul-smelling odor molecules, enclosing—and thus permanently binding—them in the molecular structure of the absorber.