| Summary: |
This project intends to present the cork as a competitive material for environmental problems, namely the elimination of water-soluble and dispersed oils and hydrocarbons. The conventional methods that include physical and chemical processes are quite efficient when oils and hydrocarbons are at high concentrations, but they are inefficient to remove oils and hydrocarbons at low concentration, obliging to use expensive technologies, like membrane separation and activated carbon adsorption. The HidroCork project will look for the best cork material for this application, considering the large range of source of materials and grain sizes, in order to achieve a final water effluent with the necessary quality in order to re-use the water. This objective will reduce the costs associated with the water consumption and the taxes associated with the discharge of the effluent. Moreover there will be the environmental benefit of all community by the reduction of the water consumption of the companies that use this technology.
We believe that HidroCork will present a sustainable and economically interesting system when compared with the current market solutions, namely the using of activated carbon as oil and hydrocarbons sorbent.
The success of this project will fall into the new business unit under development by Corticeira Amorim, for the improvement of sorption capacity of cork, being necessary a deep knowledge of cork performance at non-laboratory scale. |