/spandiv style="width:464px;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53668000/jpg/_53668034_water.jpg" width="464" height="261" alt="Papua New Guinea"span style="width:464px;display:inline-block;"The technology could help improve access to clean water in developing countries/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"Contaminated water can be cleaned much more effectively using a novel, cheap material, say researchers. /p pDubbed "super sand", it could become a low-cost way to purify water in the developing world./p pThe technology involves coating grains of sand in oxide of a widely available material called graphite - commonly used as lead in pencils./p pThe team describes the work in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces. /p pIn many countries around the world, access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities is still limited./p pThe World Health Organisation states that "just 60% of the population in Sub-Saharan African and 50% of the population in Oceania [islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean] use improved sources of drinking-water."/p pThe graphite-coated sand grains might be a solution - especially as people have already used sand to purify water since ancient times./ppBut with ordinary sand, filtering techniques can be tricky./p div style="width:280px;float:right;clear:right;font-size:13px;text-align:right;margin-right:20px;"blockquote style="font-weight:bold;font-size:16px;"p class="first-child"ldquo;Given that this can be synthesized using room temperature processes and also from cheap graphite sources, it is likely to be cost-efficientrdquo;/p/blockquotespan class="quote-credit"Mainak Majumder/span span class="quote-credit-title"Monash University, Australia/span /div p id="story_continues_2"Dr Wei Gao from Rice university in Texas, US, told BBC News that regular coarse sand was a lot less effective than fine sand when water was contaminated with pathogens, organic contaminants and heavy metal ions./p pWhile fine sand is slightly better, water drains through it very slowly./p p"Our product combines coarse sand with functional carbon material that could offer higher retention for those pollutants, and at the same time gives good throughput," explained Dr Gao./p pShe said that the technique the team has developed to make the sand involves dispersing graphite oxide into water and mixing it with regular sand./p p"We then heat the whole mixture up to 105C for a couple of hours to evaporate the water, and use the final product - 'coated sand' - to purify polluted water."/ppThe lead scientist of the study, Professor Pulickel Ajayan, said it was possible to modify the graphite oxide in order to make it more selective and sensitive to certain pollutants - such as organic contaminants or specific metals in dirty water./p div style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53668000/jpg/_53668032_supersand.jpg" width="304" height="200" alt="Cleaning water"span style="width:304px;"The technology could help improve access to clean water in developing countries/span /div pAnother team member, Dr Mainak Majumder from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said it had another advantage - it was cheap./p p"This material demonstrates comparable performance to some commercially available activated carbon materials," he said./p p"But given that this can be synthesized using room temperature processes and also from cheap graphite sources, it is likely to be cost-efficient."/p pHe pointed out that in Australia many mining companies extract graphite and they produce a lot of graphite-rich waste./p p"This waste can be harnessed for water purification," he said./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FXdAFv2Hz0p61UczPLuD2mbO8Og/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FXdAFv2Hz0p61UczPLuD2mbO8Og/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FXdAFv2Hz0p61UczPLuD2mbO8Og/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FXdAFv2Hz0p61UczPLuD2mbO8Og/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/k13AKk27th4" height="1" width="1"/