Leaching, Titanium Pollution ... Help?

"Titanium: A Technical Guide"
by Matthew J. Donachie

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A. Hallo Ian,

May I ask you one impertinent question, why in the HELL are you trying to evaluate Titanium's negative side?

Ti is one of the most inert metals around and hardly attacked by nearly any acids ... but doesn't love Nitric:HF.

I doubt that were you to leave some Ti in the soil that you'd get any leaching effect as it is so damned inert.

Leaching is when a less noble a less inert metal gets affected by moisture and the soil conditions... which may be acidic or alkaline. In the case of iron, it reverts to its natural state, RUST, ie.Fe203 or Fe304.

You won't, I think, get any 'atoms' getting into the airstream, you need a nasty metallurgical process to induce that. (You might think of boiling iron in some sulfuric, for example) but even then, NO ATOMS, just invisible low droplets of acid and ferric salts. But some acids can generate fumes, ie. true gases but not, I would have thought, atoms.

Ti is, as mentioned, one heck of a stable metal. However, during its processing, ie. making it, then you'd get some pollution which would be 'scrubbed' at source.

Worry not, it would not, I'm sure, affect any fauna, nor flora nor even a school boy of the 'onzieme' grade!

I don't know why I'm defending Ti when I used to fight its use for chemical equipment!

Regards,

Thanks Freeman.

My question may have sounded dumb to someone as educated as you in this field. I was also thinking to myself "Well, I've never heard of titanium pollution, and I can't find anything about it". But I had to make sure (my teacher asked that we evaluate the polluting aspects of the substances we picked) He didn't know I picked titanium, or else he would have told me it didn't pollute.

I had no idea what leaching was. We never learned about it in class. I was just looking on the internet for pollution caused by titanium and came across the words "leaching of metals" quite a lot, and a site said that that was a way that metals can pollute the environment. Guess titanium doesn't. Anyways, thanks for telling what it was and how it worked, now I'm ahead of everyone in my class.

And yeah, I noticed that in the Kroll process used to produce industry-ready titanium there is a lot of magnesium and chlorine used. I kind of thought those might pollute, seeing as how chlorine is toxic. Thanks for clearing it up for me.

By the way, it's "dixiËme", not "onziËme" (that's 11th grade)

Thanks a bunch.

A. Hi, Timothy. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--that will not "pollute" in the very loose sense of a pollutant being "a material that is out of place in a harmful way". For example, you can easily kill a plant simply by overwatering; so, are you "polluting" by watering? You can kill a saltwater fish simply by adding fresh water; so, are you "polluting" if you clean up the water that the saltwater fish is in? An animal enclosed within a limited airspace will die of oxygen deprivation; so, are we "polluting" when we do absolutely nothing?

But titanium is used in surgical implants because it doesn't seem to react with biological processes. Good luck.

A. Titanium itself is fine, but it's mainly used as an alloy, especially for surgical applications, some of the materials it's alloyed with are toxic in the body (vanadium) carcinogenic (chromium in an oxidised state), allergenic (nickel, chromium). The metal nitinol is made up of nickel and titanium, so, since 25% of people are allergic to nickel, we have another problem! hope I've been helpful!

A. Hi, Alex.

The problem with your question is probably that at this point in your education you have only a very vague idea of what you mean by "pollute". It's probably just a buzzword with no real, exact, concrete meaning -- just a loose bunch of negative, nasty connotations.

But does titanium vaporize into the air and cause smog and gray skies like gasoline does? No. Does it cause global warming? No. Does it dissolve into the water and cause fish kills like oil & petroleum products can? No. Do fish absorb it so they are unsafe to eat, as is the case with mercury? Probably not. Does it poison the land so that vegetables can't grow or are unfit to eat? Probably not. But can the mining, refining, and manufacture of titanium items cause any problems? Of course it can. Everything has consequences.

So, in addition to the things I mentioned, you have to figure out exactly what "pollute" means to you. In fact, getting you to think a little more deeply about what you actually mean by the word 'pollute' than you did yesterday is probably the real point of the project :-)

Good luck with it.

Regards,