Mercury can’t be destroyed, so figuring out effective ways to clean it up in the environment was the subject of a recent research project at the Canadian Light Source on the USask campus.
Researchers from the University of Waterloo are looking into how effective a coal called biochar (bio char) is for amending the soil to stabilize the mercury and convert it into a less toxic form.
PhD student Alana Wang says they used one of the CLS beamlines to analyze sulfur in the biochar that had been in wet and dry conditions, similar to what would happen along a flood plain.
That’s because the area they were studying was near an old textile plant in the States that leeched mercury into the soil, and it’s along a flood plain.
Wang says they found that the biochar is most effective in wet conditions, like around a riverbank.
The conclusion is that each site would have different conditions so each would have to be treated differently in the remediation process.