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Onions and garlic add pizzazz to your cooking. But they can also do a more distasteful job: onions and garlic can suck heavy metals from industrial wastewater. So finds a study in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. 

 

Good recipes start with the right ingredients. So Indian researchers rounded up onion and garlic peels from the canning industry, and dried and powdered them. They got industrial runoff from an electric motor factory in Delhi, laced with pollutants¹ like arsenic², iron, lead, nickel and tin. They spiked³ that runoff with even more heavy metals. And then added a pinch of onion powder.

 

In just half an hour, the onion gunk mopped up nearly 70 percent of the lead, iron and tin in the wastewater. It might work because onions and garlic contain a dietary fiber⁴ called inulin, which can bond with metal ions.

 

Conventional wastewater treatment is pricey - small industries in developing countries can't afford it. So low-tech solutions like this might help clean up waterways like India's Yamuna River - a waterway so polluted that it might be freshened by onions and garlic.

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