Why Peat?
Peat is a renewable natural resource with great potential, having inherent characteristics that make it suitable for various applications serving a wide range of industries. The team at APT, along with its partners, is working hard at identifying and developing the potential of peat. Using reed sedge peat as the base to our products, we are looking far beyond the use of peat as a soil amendment. While poor soils do benefit greatly by the addition of peat blended into the soil, American Peat Technology has focused its efforts on other value added products.
During the last glacier retreat some 10,000 years ago, shallow lakebeds formed in the depression left behind. These shallow lakes provided excellent conditions in the formation of reed sedge peat. The parent material, (cattails, reeds, sedges, etc.) grew in the standing water of these shallow beds, and when they died, they settled in the anaerobic conditions at the bottom. This anaerobic condition produced a slow rate of decomposition, allowing certain chemical reactions to take place as the peat formed.
These chemical reactions formed a very stable and active molecular structure, which we at APT have begun identifying with the assistance of Dr. Igor Kolomytsin of the Natural Resource Research Institute, an extension of the University of Minnesota. These active sites are responsible for the natural affinity reed sedge peat has for adsorbing dissolved heavy metals. The adsorption is not merely mechanical. There are five mechanisms identified as responsible for the adsorption of the metals. These mechanisms are:
- Ion-exchange
- Surface adsorption
- Chemisorption
- Complexation
- Adsorption-Complexation
It certain groups, it has long been known that peat has an affinity for dissolved heavy metals, but this affinity was never fully understood. The biggest issue facing the use of raw peat as a media for water treatment is the difficulty of passing water through the peat. Raw peat is very fibrous and the permeability is very low. The use of engineered wetlands is common practice, but the surface area needed for treatment is large and can easily become inefficient and uneconomical.
The engineers at APT developed a patent pending process of heat-treating granular peat. This process produces a hard, porous granular media, trade named APTsorb. APTsorb’s hardness allows the media to withstand hydraulic loading and being underwater for long periods of time without breaking down. The highly porous nature of APTsorb allows both permeability and access to the active internal surface area. This allows a much smaller footprint than other natural treatment solutions.