Antibacterial composite films of oxidized alginate-chitosan-ZnO anchored Cu nanoparticles for the degradation of organic pollutants.

The growing population and urbanization have adversely affected the environment including water. The waste water from industries has affected not only human but also animals. The availability of clean water is one of the foremost needs for living organism. This makes very urgent to find reliable solutions for cleaning waste water. These days catalysis is one the best solutions to remove and degrade organic pollutants. In this work, porous composite polymer films have been designed through facile method which were employed to stabilize zero-valent metal nanoparticles (NPs). The sustainable, environmentally friendly polymer matrix with attached metal NPs was applied for the effective catalytic degradation of both phenolic compounds and organic dyes. The different composite films consist of ZnO NPs embedded in an Oxidized Alginate-Chitosan (OAlg-CS) biomatrix named as OAlg-CS/ZnO with various percentages of ZnO as a support for metallic Cu NPs. The ZnO NPs have been incorporated into OAlg-CS polymer with 10, 15, and 20 wt% and are designated as OAlg-CS/ZnO-10, OAlg-CS/ZnO-15, OAlg-CS/ZnO-20. Various analytical techniques were utilized to investigate the shape, morphology, elemental composition, functional groups and stability of the composite films. All these polymer nanocomposite films were then evaluated for removal of model organic pollutants comprising p-nitrophenol (4-NP), methylene blue (MB), and methyl orange (MO). The Kapp value for 4-NP was 2.19 × 10-1 min-1, 4.68 × 10-1 min-1 for MO and 8.99× 10-1 min-1 for MB. The experimental results demonstrated that OAlg-CS/ZnO-20 films show the highest catalytic activity as compared to OAlg-CS/ZnO, OAlg-CS/ZnO-10, and OAlg-CS/ZnO-15. The order of rate constants for nitrophenol and dyes using OAlg-CS/ZnO-20 was found to be MB ˃ MO ˃ 4-NP, showing the selectivity of these composite films. The prepared composite films were also investigated for their antibacterial activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and all the films exhibited good anti-bacterial activity, with OAlg-CS/ZnO-20 showed the highest anti-bacterial activity.