Classical separation he intimacy of the electron in regards to chemistry has been long exploited by the field’s practitioners. This year marks the bicentennial of English chemist Sir Humphry Davy’s determination that chlorine is an element (and thus removing Lavoisier’s guess that oxygen was inextricably linked to acids). Davy used the eponymous pile by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta to discover much of the leftmost side of the periodic table, which of course frequently finds its members in a salty chloridic form. In a field peppered with eponymous units of measure, devices, and concepts (e.g., amperes, coulombs, farads, and volts, galvanic cells, Maxwell’s equations), the giants of 19th century (western European) science showed what magic could be wrought with the electron in a world ignorant of the quantum underpinnings. Electrochemistry has long been useful in environmental science as a tool to measure dissolved metals and track their interaction with (ionized) organic matter. This importance was highlighted in our October 1, 2009 Tribute to Jacques Buffle and the more recent January 1, 2010 Focus on Biogeochemical Redox Processes. Electro-enviro-chemistry is hardly limited to pure scientific application. Many articles herein exploit the natural biogeochemical abilities of microbes in the technological exploitation of microbial fuel cells, with Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es9025358 being a recent example. In this February 15, 2010 print issue,
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10.1021/es100118b
2010 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 02/11/2010
Schlegel et al. (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/ es9021987) show that materials can be made to better resist that electrochemical phenomenon known as corrosion and thus serve as better storage for pernicious wastes such as the radioactive kind. Another eponymous and clever exploitation of electrochemistry that comes in the guise of a filter technology concerns the Donnan effect. This corollary of thermodynamics permits the separation of ionic substances within liquids. In this issue’s Feature, Sarkar et al. describe how Donnan-active materials can clean wastewater more sustainably. As miraculous as their Figure 3 appears, there are still intricacies of Donnan methods to be ironed out, as addressed by Groenenberg et al. (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es902615w). Therefore as these technologies are refined, dreams of a clean and wide-open future continue to be imaginable thanks to the classical work carried out in the dingy cubbyholes of a Victorian world.
Darcy J. Gentleman Managing Editor
[email protected] February 15, 2010 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 1157
