Metallic Iron for Water Treatment: Lost Science in the West

There are many ways to waste own time: Doing nothing, doing the wrong thing, doing the good thing at the wrong time" (own translation). The situation is quite different if the time is robbed by someone else or even by a professional mistake. There is a clear evidence that researchers on metallic iron (Fe 0 -termed as zero-valent iron) for water treatment as performed for the past three decades have wasted time in wrongly rediscovering aspects carefully documented in the scientific literature [1,2] and textbooks [3,4] before 1940.