Spinning CDs to Clean Sewage Water Scientists find a potential new use for old music CDs: coating disks in photocatalytic compounds and spinning them to clean water Audio CDs, all the rage in the ‘90s, seem increasingly obsolete in a world of MP3 files and iPods, leaving many music lovers with the question of what to do with their extensive compact disk collections. While you could turn your old disks into a work of avant-garde art, researchers in Taiwan have come up with a more practical application: breaking down sewage. The team will present its new wastewater treatment device at the Optical Society’s (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2013, being held Oct. 6-10 in Orlando, Fla. Figure 1: This image shows an optical disk entirely coated with zinc oxide nanorods. (Photo credit: Din Ping Tsai, National Taiwan University) This scanning electron microscope image shows tiny nanorods growing on the disk. (Photo credit: Din Ping Tsai, National Taiwan University) “Optical disks are cheap, readily available, and very commonly used,” says Din Ping Tsai, a physicist at National Taiwan University. Close to 20 billion disks are already manufactured annually, the researchers note, so using old disks for water treatment might

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