Rapid Catalytic Water Disinfection from Earth Abundant Ca 2 Fe 2 O 5 Brownmillerite

Water disinfection is a crucial challenge for humanity. Approaches that are effective, cheap, environmentally friendly, and do not promote gene exchange between bacteria are urgently required. Strongly oxidizing radicals are highly promising to achieve this as they lead to bacterial activation at high efficiencies. However, sources to consistently generate these radicals are limited to high energy UV/H2O2 treatments requiring a large energy input. Here the use of abundant, cheap, brownmillerite (Ca2Fe2O5) is demonstrated as an efficient radical generation material under dark conditions, showing a seven order of magnitude decrease in bacterial concentration over 10 min. This decrease is attr…