Even though heavy and transition metals originated in
the earth’s
crust, the significant human exposure and environmental pollution
consequences of anthropogenic activities include industrial production
and waste, mining and smelting operations, and agricultural and domestic
usage of metals. Because of their nonbiodegradable nature, heavy metal
ions such as Cu2+ accumulate very quickly in plants and
edible animals, ultimately ending up in the human food cycle. Therefore,
to nullify the detrimental effects of Cu2+ ions for the
sake of the environment and living organisms, we are motivated to
design a sensor molecule that can not only detect Cu2+ ions
but also remove them selectively from the water medium. To detect
the Cu2+ ions, we synthesized a monomer (NCu) and its biodegradable caprolactone-based polymer (PNCu). It was observed that both NCu and PNCu showed higher selectivity toward Cu2+ ions by changing
the color from colorless to yellow, with a limit of detection value
of 29 nM and 0.3 μM. Furthermore, removing the Cu2+ ions from the water solution was also accomplished by introducing
the hydrophobicity of the polymer (PNCu) through the
ring-opening polymerization process. Due to increased hydrophobicity,
the polymer produced a yellow color precipitate upon adding Cu2+ ions to the solution; thus, removal of the metal ion is
possible using our designed polymer and its detection ability. We
checked the removal efficiency of our polymer by using UV–vis
spectroscopy and EDX analysis, which indicated that almost all of
the copper is removed by our polymer. Therefore, to our knowledge,
this is the first biodegradable caprolactone-based polymer for colorimetric
turn-on detection and separation of the Cu2+ ions from
the water.