Cactus Goo - 0 views
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used for scouring arsenic, bacteria and cloudiness out of rural drinking water
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There, the residual water from boiling the flat, oval-shaped lobes of prickly pear for salads and other dishes was used to clear up cloudy water drawn from the river before use for cooking or drinking.
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Mucilage is the clear, gooey, viscous liquid from within the cactus which helps to seal water inside the plant so it can survive desert-dry conditions.
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She found that the mucilage binds to the dirt and causes the particles to coagulate, forming large enough clumps that they can settle out of the water.
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The group's more recent research has shown that the mucilage can also form a complex with arsenic, a carcinogenic water contaminant that can occur naturally or from industrial or agricultural pollution.
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"Sometimes we get 80 percent removal, and sometimes we get lower than 50 percent removal," Alcantar said. "We don't yet know exactly what it is; we haven't found what are the exact best conditions for the mucilage [to get the most arsenic removal]."