Metals removal
MetaClean GA™
During the last few decades, legislators world-wide have instituted regulations to protect the environment from various contaminants,including heavy metals.
Heavy metals are present in many kinds of effluents and flue gases. Their acute toxicity at very low doses and their trend to accumulate in the living organisms explain the growing need for heavy metals removal in effluents as well as the increasingly strict regulations met worldwide. Industrial treatments able to reach the low levels required are chemical precipitation, ion exchange, adsorption, electrolysis and many sorts of filtration.
MetaClean™ is a range of sulphur based chemical precipitants enabling achievement of these very low levels of heavy metals simply and effectively.
MetaClean™ Precipitation (ppm of residual metal in treated water after chelation with various precipitants)
| Metal | Carbonate | Hydroxide | MetaClean™ |
| Silver (Ag) | 5 | 16 | 4 x 10-15 |
| Mercury (Hg) | 10-2 | 6 x 10-13 | 10-36 |
| Nickel (Ni) | 2 | 4 x 10-3 | 6 x 10-7 |
| Lead (Pb) | 6 x 10-6 | 3 x 10-7 | 8 x 10-13 |
| Zinc (Zn) | 10-3 | 5 x 10-4 | 5 x 10-7 |
Metals can be removed to various extents by accurately controlling their pH and forming the metal hydroxide. Unfortunately, as with most things in life, those metals all have minimum solubilities at differing pH values. This means that if you have a multi-metal system then pH control will assist with one of your metals but probably won't be as effective with the others. This is where MetaClean™ puts chemistry on your side.