Russian graduate students have discovered a new way to produce bleach for paper
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It can be made from waste agricultural fertilizers
A new method for obtaining a reagent for paper bleaching – sodium chlorate – was proposed by graduate students of the University of Science and Technology MISIS Ilya Fureev and Akim Ergeshev. It turned out that it can be extracted from waste potash fertilizers, thus killing three birds with one stone: solving the issue of import substitution, cleaning the soil from harmful salts and organizing production in Russia with additional jobs.
In the USSR, the production of sodium chlorate was put on a grand scale. However, due to restructuring, the factories were destroyed. Without its own production, Russia annually imported about 40,000 tons of sodium chlorate worth more than $20 million. The main deliveries were made from Finland.
In March 2022, they stopped, after which many pulp and paper enterprises suspended their work, and prices for office paper crept up. A new method for producing sodium chlorate can help not only revive the industrial production of bleach, but also solve a number of other important problems.
If the traditional way to obtain this substance is electrolysis (electrochemical oxidation) of aqueous solutions of table salt, then young scientists proposed to extract it from waste that remains after the extraction and enrichment of potash ores for the production of fertilizers.
As MK was informed at the institute, such wastes containing potash ores and mineral concentrates of rock salt have a sufficient content of sodium chloride for cost-effective extraction of sodium chlorate from them. Post-graduate students of the institute have proved by laboratory means that by “chasing” potash production waste through electrolysis, it is possible to obtain sodium chlorate that meets the requirements of GOST.
By the way, after electrolysis, by-products remain in the form of solutions containing sodium hypochlorite, which can also be used as a means of purifying and disinfecting water.
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