Magnetic Hierarchically Macroporous Emulsion-Templated Poly(acrylic acid)–Iron Oxide Nanocomposite Beads for Water Remediation

Tainting of waterbodies with noxious industrial waste is the gravest environmental concern of the day that continues to wreak inevitable havoc on human health. To cleanup these hard-to-remove life-threatening water contaminants, we have prepared hierarchically porous poly(acrylic acid) beads by emulsion templating. These emulsion-templated macroporous polymer beads not only mediate the synthesis of Fe3O4 nanoparticles inside their porous network using a coprecipitation approach but, in turn, create diverse anchoring sites to immobilize an additional poly(acrylic acid) active layer onto the nanocomposite beads. These post-synthetically modified nanocomposite beads with macropores and abundant acrylic acid moieties offer the ready mass transfer and fair advantage of relatively higher overall negative charge to efficiently adsorb lead [Pb(II)] and crystal violet with impressive performance-even superior to many of the materials explored in this regard so far. Furthermore, the strong entanglement of nanoparticles in the porous polymeric scaffolds tackles the curb of trade-off between all-round effective remediation and secondary pollution and the millimeter size eases their processing and recovery during the adsorption tests, thereby making these materials practically worthwhile.