Lead, in particular, has been used in paints, ceramic glazes, jewelry, toys and in pipes.
Current commercial methods to remove heavy metals including lead from municipal drinking water can be expensive in terms of money and energy and are inefficient.
That ability, plus the large surface area and chemical tunability of MOFs make them a promising material to remove heavy metals selectively from water.
The researchers created a water-stable MOF/polymer composite with cheap, environmentally and biologically friendly materials and tested its ability to remove heavy metals from water.
It had one of the highest reported removal capacities to date, removing over 1.6 times its own weight of mercury and 40 percent of its weight in lead.
The researchers tested the MOFs in solutions with lead levels similar to those found in contaminated water samples from Flint, Michigan.
The researchers also demonstrated how the material could be regenerated easily without toxic products.
Drinking water contamination with heavy metals, particularly lead, is a persistent problem worldwide with grave public health consequences.
Further, the composite properties are well-maintained in river and sea water samples spiked with only trace amounts of lead, illustrating unprecedented selectivity.
The material is further shown to be resistant to fouling when tested in high concentrations of common organic interferents, like humic acid, and is fully regenerable over many cycles.

Lead, in particular, has been used in paints, ceramic glazes, jewelry, toys and in pipes.
Current commercial methods to remove heavy metals including lead from municipal drinking water can be expensive in terms of money and energy and are inefficient.
That ability, plus the large surface area and chemical tunability of MOFs make them a promising material to remove heavy metals selectively from water.
The researchers created a water-stable MOF/polymer composite with cheap, environmentally and biologically friendly materials and tested its ability to remove heavy metals from water.
It had one of the highest reported removal capacities to date, removing over 1.6 times its own weight of mercury and 40 percent of its weight in lead.
The researchers tested the MOFs in solutions with lead levels similar to those found in contaminated water samples from Flint, Michigan.
The researchers also demonstrated how the material could be regenerated easily without toxic products.
Drinking water contamination with heavy metals, particularly lead, is a persistent problem worldwide with grave public health consequences.
Further, the composite properties are well-maintained in river and sea water samples spiked with only trace amounts of lead, illustrating unprecedented selectivity.
The material is further shown to be resistant to fouling when tested in high concentrations of common organic interferents, like humic acid, and is fully regenerable over many cycles.

This Solar-Powered Tool Can Create Fresh Water Out of Thin Air.
In the future, every household will be able to produce nearly three liters of water daily from thin air using the solar-powered tool.
The solar-powered tool uses a special material called a metal-organic framework, which was developed in Omar Yaghi’s laboratory at the University of California Berkeley.
The researchers were able to create a solar-powered "sponge-like" device that can pull water from the air, according to a report from Science Magazine.
"This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity," Yaghi, one of two senior authors, said.
"There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy.
It was in 2014 that Yaghi crafted a metal-organic framework that binds water vapor, eventually teaming up with MIT’s Evelyn Wang and her team to develop a water-collecting system.
Wang’s team used a kilogram of the dust-sized metal-organic framework crystals in a thin sheet of porous copper metal, which was placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, then inside a chamber.
The vapor then condenses as liquid water.
"One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household," Yaghi added.

Scientists Turn Air Into Drinking Water With Device Powered Solely by Sunlight.
Scientists have created a device that can pull drinking water from the air using only the power of sunlight.
That could change the lives of the 4 billion people around the globe who lack access to safe drinking warer for at least one month per year.
The technology is based on a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF), first developed by Yaghi more than 20 years ago.
Recently, he and Wang, a mechanical engineer, teamed up to develop an MOF device that could collect water.
This was in conditions with just 20 to 30 percent humidity.
Wang tells Newsweek that at the moment, the device is not viable as a commercial product.
We can then think about clever designs of how to stack these layers into the system by which you can enhance the transportation of the vapor molecules and the production of the water.” The plan is to create a 30-liter system, about the size of a carry-on suitcase, which would be able to provide drinking water for a family of four each day.
Certainly, there are many techniques for capturing water at high humidity but all those don’t work at low humidity as this MOF device does.
“This is the first material and device capable of water capture and delivery under such conditions, making it potentially possible to water those areas where water is scarce.

And while a lot of research has focussed on desalination, a team of scientists have now come up with another possible solution – a device that pulls fresh water out of thin air, even in places with humidity as low as 20 percent.
Called the ‘solar-powered harvester’, the device was created by teams from MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, using a special type of material known as a metal-organic framework (MOF).
So far the prototype device has been tested under conditions of 20 to 30 percent humidity, and was able to pull 2.8 litres (3 quarts) of water from the air over a 12- hour period, using 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF.
"One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household," said Yaghi.
Unlike regular sheets of metals, MOFs are structures where metals such as magnesium or aluminium are combined with organic molecules in an arrangement that creates rigid, porous structures ideal for storing gases or liquids.
The MIT team then took dust-sized crystals of this MOF and compressed them between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, and placed the whole thing inside a chamber that was exposed to the outside air.
Sunlight then heats the MOF up and pushes the bound water towards the condenser, which is the same temperature as the outside air.
This vapour condenses as liquid water, and drips into a collector to provide clean drinking water.
"This work offers a new way to harvest water from air that does not require high relative humidity conditions and is much more energy efficient than other existing technologies," said MIT team leader, Evelyn Wang.
"To have water running all the time, you could design a system that absorbs the humidity during the night and evolves it during the day," he added.