This beer-making waste may offer a new stream for cleaner water
The research offers yet another way the brewery industry might repurpose its myriad by-products
Scientists have discovered that beer-making waste can potentially provide a cleaner water solution. By converting a common by-product called spent malt rootlets into a charcoal-like substance called biochar, researchers found that it can remove bacteria from water more effectively than traditional sand filtration. When mixed with sand, biochar was able to remove five times as many Escherichia coli bacteria as sand filtration alone.
This could offer a sustainable approach for water remediation and groundwater protection, according to Ioannis Manariotis, the senior author of the study and an environmental engineer at the University of Patras in Greece. The researchers also tested whether waste from olive oil and coffee production could have similar purifying effects, and now plan to test the biochar's efficacy under more unpredictable real-life conditions.
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