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 covers 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

There is a broad range of polluting elements that exists. In the marine environment, we can mention nitrate, nitrite, heavy metals, phenols, plastics, PCB, pharmaceutical residues etc.... All these elements can distrupt the fauna and the flora.
These problems especially impact the whole food chain of marine biotopes. Thus, mankind is both guilty and victim of this catastrophy.

This year, our objective is to develop a filtrating system which could allow sensing and eventually degradation of pollutants. To this end, we chose to work on elements belonging to the most important classes of pollutants of the marine environment.