Degradation of DDT, a Pesticide by Mixed Metal Oxides Nanoparticles

Abstract

The pesticides use is unavoidable to meet the food production demands of the ever-increasing population. However, these organo-chemicals and their naturally degraded products have tendencies to bio-accumulate and enter into food chain. The toxic nature of these harmful chemicals has become a serious threat to environment in general and to human health in particular. Significantly, high levels of organochlorine pesticides have found to be proliferated into various foodstuffs taken from different regions of India. Average intake of DDT is found to be 48 μg/g, which is quite high. The wide range health hazards and the ability of bioaccumulation of pesticides and their generated waste by-products necessitate the need to degrade these to safer products using suitable economically viable techniques. Mixed metal oxides (MMO) nanoparticles are potential versatile heterogeneous catalysts and may find use in the field of synthetic organic chemistry. The nanostructured binary mixed metal oxides of bivalent metal ion Mg2+ with Al3+ and Ce4+ have been synthesized by sol–gel methods with suitable modifications to increase surface area and to decrease size. The mixed metal oxides have been characterized by several spectroscopic and analytical techniques such as XRD, SEM, TEM. Thereafter the catalysis activity of the nanoparticles was tested on DDT degradation by gas chromatography. Results indicated that nanoparticles are efficient catalyst in remediation of DDT as 90% degradation was achieved in first 24 h.