Porous sulfur polymers for effective aqueous-phase organic contaminant removal – a low-cost sustainable material

Emerging contaminants in supposably potable water supplies are a global and growing concern. Maintaining conventional water treatment approaches to tackle growing contamination levels would mean exponentially increasing treatment costs, with some contaminants circumventing these efforts altogether. New approaches for water treatment are therefore required. Sulfur polymers made by “inverse vulcanization” are a highly promising candidate material for this purpose. In this work, porous sulfur polymers (PSPs) were synthesized from elemental sulfur and 1,3-diisopropenylbenzene, with porosity introduced via salt templating. The result is a material that can strongly absorb and chemically neutralize a model contaminant (caffeine). PSPs show adsorption up to 5 times higher than a leading adsorption material (activated carbon). This is the first-ever report demonstrating sulfur polymers as effective materials for removing emerging contaminants from water. The versatile synthesis of sulfur polymers offers variation, which means that there is much more to explore in this exciting research area.