By Efe Onodjae 

Taiwo Bakare-Abidola, an environmental scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Southern University in United States is making strides in the field of water treatment and pollution monitoring. 

With expertise in water and wastewater management, Bakare-Abidola’s research addresses the growing global water pollution crisis, offering innovative solutions to ensure access to clean water for communities around the world.

Taiwo Bakare-Abidola an alumni of Lagos State University, LASU began her PhD sojourn in 2023 at Georgia Southern University in United States after securing a fully funded scholarship to study Environmental Science. 

In her recent combined publication, ‘Enhanced extraction of methylene blue by dodecyl-methyl imidazolium dodecyl sulfate GUMBOS – magnetic alginate beads’ Taiwo Bakare-Abidola noted that access to high quality water is one the biggest problems that is facing the world population for several issues such as climate change, increment on worldwide population, careless and abusive use of water, as well as water pollution. 

She further noted that Water pollution is one of the principal issues due to the indiscriminate use of chemical products and the consequent introduction of a great variety of contaminants into water bodies such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastics, cosmetics, dyes from different sources. 

“The presence of all these hazardous chemicals in wastewater has detrimental impacts on aquatic life, soil fertility, aquatic resources, and the integrity of ecosystems. Methylene blue is a commonly employed dye for several applications such as textile industry, and medicine 

“Among all the industries, textile industries are the main contributor to the introduction of MB to the environment through wastewater due to the low adhesion into the cloth materials. Although the dye is not regarded particularly toxic, methylene blue has a few negative impacts on humans and animals, causing increased heart rate, nausea, and vomiting”.

She further concluded that Dodecyl methyl imidazolium dodecyl sulfate GUMBOS were synthesized through a simple, green, and cost-effective method and incorporated into alginate-based magnetic beads. 

“The magnetic properties introduced by the γ-Fe2O3 allowed a fast and easy separation of synthesized beads after the removal procedure. These beads, with an average diameter of 2.2 mm, effectively adsorbed methylene blue (MB) from aqueous solutions. Maximum adsorption was achieved at pH 10 with 100 mg of beads. The adsorption kinetics followed a pseudo-first-order model, and Langmuir isotherm model. 

“The adsorption of the MB was achieved in high percentage even in presence of other interferences such as copper cation and ibuprofen that are contaminants that are commonly present in aqueous samples. In addition, the [C12MIm][DS]-beads achieved the removal of MB in approximately 70% inclusive in the presence of another dye (MG), indicating that synthesized beads are able to remove more that one contaminant from aqueous samples. Finally, the desorption-adsorption capabilities of the synthesized beads was evaluated for six consecutive cycles. 

“The desorption was performed in presence of a NaCl ethanolic solution, and the recycled beads were able to extract MB maintaining a high adsorption approximately 70%. Moreover, the surface morphology of the beads was not change through the recycling process. The GUMBOS based alginate magnetic beads fabricated in this work have a great potential as extractive material for the remediation, or cleaning procedure of wastewater or environmental waters.”