Team:Evry/Project/Compounds/Introduction

Human activities are responsible for an important pollution of drinking water as well as sea water. Yet, water is the most precious and fragile ressource, as it's vital to every living organisms. It recovers 71% of the Earth and in this huge amount of water, approximately 97% is saline and 3% is freshwater. (Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, 1993)

Figure1: Water on Earth

The polluting elements are very varied. In the marine environment, we can quote nitrate, nitrite, heavy metals, phenols, plastics, PCB, pharmaceutical residues etc.... All these elements can cause a lot of problems to the fauna and a fortiori to the flora.
This disruption especially impacts fishes and consequently the food chain of its biotope and those fed by this biocenose. Thus mankind is both guilty and victim of its own product.

This year, our team objective is to develop a filtrating system which could allow to sense and could even degrade pollutants in the future. For this project, we chose to work on elements most great classes of marine pollutants belonging to most important classes of pollutants of the marine environment.