Geologically Inspired Monoliths for Sustainable Release of Essential Minerals into Drinking Water

Decreasing mineral content in drinking water is a serious concern especially due to the proliferation of desalination technologies. We present an approach to remineralize water with essential minerals such that their concentrations are at the recommended daily dose. We accomplished this using composite materials whose composition and surface area were tuned to achieve constant release of minerals into water over a prolonged period of time. We developed a nature-mimicking tectosilicate porous composite matrix and used it as a structural framework to incorporate leachable minerals to the extent of 40% of the whole mass, which were released into the water during its functional working life. Release of not only the common macro minerals but also the vital trace minerals was possible in this work. Compacted composites of this kind have been used to create mineralization cartridges. The greenness of these composites evaluated from several sustainability metrics shows that the manufacturing process has minimum or negligible carbon emission, E-factor, and energy consumption. This methodology may be extended to encompass all the essential minerals expected to be present in water.