Pesticide treatment and optimization with zero-valent iron nanoparticles

Pesticides used unconsciously are harmful both to our nature and to us. Metabolites resulting from the breakdown of many harmful pesticides and the parent compound itself have a high residue potential in nature. Many factors such as weather and soil conditions, application doses, application environment and time of application play an important role in these degradation processes. For example, while DDT and imidacloprid pesticides can remain in the soil for a long time without being degraded, some of them can form more harmless metabolites over time, mix into groundwater or form more harmful metabolites depending on the environmental conditions. Over time, there has been a need for decontamination of pesticides accumulated in soil and water. Although various treatment methods have emerged in response to this need, most of them are expensive, laborious and inadequate in large areas. Most of the techniques used are based on chemical treatment, but since chemical treatment is expensive and not an environmentally friendly technique, there is a need to search for new techniques that are more environmentally friendly, lower cost and higher performance. Nanotechnology, one of the fastest developing sciences of recent years, has provided a very positive response to this need. By converting a macro-sized material into a nano-sized particle, for example, billions of iron nanoparticles can be synthesized from an iron weighing only 1 g, and when the surface area of each iron nanoparticle is calculated, a material with a very high surface area can be obtained from a small macro-sized material. The highly successful use of iron particles in the remediation of pesiticides and many other compounds has the potential to create great excitement about the use of uncharged iron nanoparticles in pesiticide treatment. In this study, +2 or +3 valence iron was made ready to be used in pesticide treatment by making it uncharged and used in the treatment of Deltamethrin, a pyrethroid ester residue. In order to reveal the effect of the removal values obtained as a result of the study on toxicity, it was treated with uncharged iron nanoparticles. MTT test was applied to the samples and as a result of the experiment, a detoxification rate of 84% was obtained.