Prof. Ioannis KATSOYIANNIS
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GREECE
Association of Greek Chemists
Dr Ioannis Katsoyiannis is Associate Professor of Environmental Technology at the department of Chemistry of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the President of the Association of Greek Chemists and the Hellenic Industrial Property Academy and member of the administrative council of the Hellenic Industrial Property Organization. He is director of the Institute of Sustainable Water Management and Water Law of the European Public Law Organization, (EPLO), an organization which is accredited with United Nations. He is an expert in water and wastewater treatment technologies, water reuse, solid waste management and circular economy. He was recipient of prestigious international fellowhsips and awards, such as from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Swiss Science National Foundation and he received a Marie Curie Individual fellowship. He has conducted research at the Technical University of Berlin, Technical University of Hamburg, the ETH (Zurich) and the EPFL (Lausanne). Between 2008 and 2014 he has worked as principal chemical engineer for the giant engineering companies Alstom Power and Hitachi Power Europe in the design, construction, and commissioning of some of the bigger thermal power plants in Europe. He has consulted several companies in issues related with solid waste management, hazardous or no-hazardous characterization, waste reuse and recycling. As a researcher, he has authored more than 85 research papers, which have received to date more than 7000 citations and has an H-index of 41 and is listed during the last 4 years at the 2% of most cited researchers worldwide. He has been scientific responsible in several research projects, with an accumulative budget of about 1 million euros and has been invited more than 25 times to give lectures worldwide in international conferences and advanced schools, and in 2023 he gave a statement about the world water situation at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. Professor Katsoyiannis used to be member of the Executive board of European Chemical Society (EuChemS) and Chair of the division of Chemistry and Environment of EuChemS and currently represents EuChemS at the Zero Pollution Stakeholders Platform of European Commission and is editor for the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research (Springer).
Arsenic Contamination of Groundwaters and Novel Approaches for its Removal
Ioannis A. Katsoyiannis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Chemistry, Thessaloniki, 54124 Greece
Email: katsogia@chem.auth.gr
Arsenic contamination of groundwaters is still a matter of concern in several countries across the world, among which also Balkan countries, such as Serbia and Greece. Treatment of drinking water for arsenic (As) removal has been implemented in centralized facilities worldwide, reflecting the increasingly stringent national and international drinking water standards for As, for which a standard of 10 μg/L has been widely adopted. On the other hand, in several countries in South East Asia, the problem of arsenic contamination is severe, and treatment of groundwater is based on low-tech technologies, which are efficient for arsenic removal but installed community filters lack the capacity to provide the required amounts of drinking water to the local population. A review of available information on installed treatment does provide some insight into the scale of implementation and difficulties that have arisen in practice (as a complement to more accessible information on bench-scale and pilot-scale studies).
In practice, the two most applied technologies for arsenic removal are coagulation using iron-based salts and adsorption based on iron or alumina based adsorbents. For both of these technologies, Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of arsenic removal from groundwaters will be discussed in relation the groundwater composition, knowledge which is very critical in the decision of the treatment option to be implemented.
