A series of nanomaterials were fabricated using reduction from natural plant products. An advantage of this approach, particularly when involved with water disinfection is that the reducing agents do not need to be removed from the environment, since they are non-toxic and are used by plants as antioxidants. The molar ratio was not determined due to the complexity of natural products in tea or coffee, although the major class of water soluble components were polyphenols, which has been shown in the published studies to be antioxidants. Through visual inspection of the colour and texture change, an appropriate volume ratio to nanoparticles was obtained, indicating that the natural products did reduce silver ions to silver, as confirmed using ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. Other spectroscopes indicates that as fabricated systems were crystalline and had mainly face centered cubic unit cell geometries with size ranging between 100-5 nm, that could be controlled through careful addition of reducing agent. The as fabricated nanomaterials appeared to be effective disinfectants in the parts-per-million range, which is much lower than the published concentrations to disinfect water using bleach. The advantages of nanomaterials over bleach were that nanomaterials has greater lifetimes (weeks versus days), required much less dose to kill 100 % of cells (microgram versus milligram), were less toxic to the use than bleach and unlike bleach could be engineered to be active under visible light through incorporation of silver or have magnetic properties through incorporation of iron, or could be synthesised in spherical or hollow-shell configuration through incorporation of organic binders. The above indicate that the use of natural products is an effective remedy to reduce nanomaterials metals salts to the zerovalent state, which is more cost effective in terms of cost of raw materials with less environmental toxicity and reducing agent toxicity when compared to common organic reducing agents such as sodium borohydride..

Synthesis, characterization and environmental application of nanometal and nanometal composites derived from natural products

2019 Fall National Meeting

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