SANTA CRUZ — UC Santa Cruz chemists have developed a new type of material that can soak up pollutants from water, and the work could lead to better methods for dealing with radioactive waste and removing pollutants from agricultural runoff and other sources from waterways.

The research, led by Associate Professor of Chemistry Scott Oliver and graduate student Honghan Fei, is detailed in a paper published in the this month’s issue of the chemistry journal “Angewandte Chemie.” The theory behind the research is similar to how an ion exchange process is used in water softeners.

In a softener, sodium ions that have a weak attachment to a negatively-charged resin are exchanged for the hard-water minerals, which have a stronger attachment to the resin.

Water softening techniques are effective for removing minerals such as calcium and magnesium, which occur as positively-charged ions in hard water. Yet, some heavy metals and other inorganic pollutants form negatively-charged ions in water, and current methods to extract them are costly and inefficient.

The material’s chemical name is copper hydroxide ethanedisulfonate, but the scientists have dubbed the green substance SLUG-26. It has a layered structure of positively charged two-dimensional sheets with a high capacity for holding onto negative ions.

Oliver has been working on this research since 1999, when he was a professor at State University of New York, Binghamton. He came to UCSC in 2004 and continued working on the project. For more than a decade, Oliver, with students and research partners, went through the pains-staking process of trying to find the right material.

“Usually the clays and rocks we look at are in a negative charge,” Oliver said, “So what were doing is a little unnatural, it’s going against nature.” The current focus of the research is on using the material to trap technetium, a radioactive metal that is a major concern for the disposal of radioactive waste. In water, technetium forms the negative ion pertechenetate, which can leach out of solid waste and contaminate groundwater.

“In the long term we’d like to use it to get chromate and perchlorate out of water,” Oliver said of pollutants found in waterways like the Colorado River.

“That will be harder since you are talking about cleaning huge volumes of water.” Oliver is working on getting funding to try the new material on “simulated nuclear waste,” and, if that works, he plans to test it on actually cleaning up waste at the federal governments nuclear facilities.