Oil Spill Clean‐Up Tool Based on Castor Oil and Coffee Grounds Magnetic Resins

Abstract

Aiming to reduce the anthropogenic environmental impact some wastes can be used as raw material in other process. Considering that, coffee grounds powder before and after acetylation process were used as a filler in a new composite material that is able to clean up spilled oil from the surface of water. The polymeric matrix was a polyurethane and maghemite nanoparticles was used as filler to provide magnetic properties to the material. In this study, four different materials were prepared: the first was the resin matrix; the second was the composite containing only 5% w/w of magnetizable nanoparticles; the third was the composite containing 5% w/w of the magnetizable nanoparticles and 10% w/w of coffee grounds; and the last was similar the former but containing acetylated coffee grounds powder. All of the obtained materials were characterized by FTIR, XRD, TGA, magnetic force and susceptibility, density, water absorption amount and oil removal capability. The results showed that each gram of composite material containing 10% of coffee grounds powder was able to sorb (9.6 ± 0.5) grams of crude oil, while the composite containing the same amount of acetylated coffee grounds was able to remove (9.4 ± 0.6) grams of crude oil. The significant advantage of the acetylation process is the lower absorption of water in comparison to the non‐acetylated analogous material. The results demonstrated that the hydrophilic tendency decreases significantly. The water/oil ratio absorbed by the materials decreased from 1.07 when using composite containing coffee grounds, to 0.41 when composite containing acetylated coffee grounds was used.