Peru’s El Cascajo Lake has undergone a successful nanotechology-enabled remediation technique developed by scientist Marino Morikawa and which he hopes can be used to clean up Lake Titicaca according to a July 6, 2016 news item on news.co.cr,
Peruvian scientist Marino Morikawa, who “revived” polluted wetlands in 15 days using nanotechnology, now plans to try to clean up Lake Titicaca and the Huacachina lagoon, an oasis in the middle of the desert.
El Cascajo, an ecosystem of roughly 50 hectares (123 acres) in Chancay district, located north of Lima, began its recovery in 2010 with two inventions that Morikawa came up with using his own resources and money.
The idea of restoring the wetlands came from a call from Morikawa’s father, who told the scientist that El Cascajo, where they used to go fishing when Marino was a child, “was in very bad condition,” Morikawa told EFE.
Marino Morikawa, who earned a degree in environmental science from Japan’s Tsukuba University, visited the wetlands and found a dump for sewage ringed by an illegal landfill where migratory birds fed.
The stinky swamp was covered by aquatic plants, Morikawa said.
The fifteen day timeline for the cleanup seems to be contradicted in this June 22, 2014 article by Rosana Pinheiro for Agencia Plano (a Latin American news portal) describes the situation at Lake El Cascajo and the nanotechnology in more detail,
Peruvian scientist Marino Morikawa created a cleanse system using nanobubbles to decontaminate lake El Cascajo, located at Chancay district, north of Lima, Peru’s capital. After nearly four years of the start of the project, 90% of the lake waters are recovered, and the place is now visited once again by at least 70 species of migratory birds.
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The lake was once home to more than a thousand species of migratory birds in the 1990s. …
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The [nanotechnology-enabled] treatment is done with tiny bubbles, the nanobubbles, a thousand times smaller than the ones we can see in a glass of soda. These bubbles attract bacteria and metals using static charge and then decompose, releasing free radicals which destroy viruses present in water. The process has been recognized by the Commission of Science, Technology and Innovation of the Peruvian Congress.
Biofilters were also deployed to ease the cleaning process of the water. Morikawa divided the wetland area with pieces of bamboo, creating sectors to order the withdrawal of the aquatic weeds.
… At the beginning, in December 2010, he worked alone, making daily visits to the region to develop the project. After some time, he started receiving help from friends, local population and local government.
A few months after the beginning of the treatment, it was possible to see that El Cascajo waters were more crystalline. However, it was only in January 2013 that “a miracle happened” as Morikawa says: Thousands of migratory birds returned to the lake and occupied about 70% of the area, forming a white cover around the water.
Whether this took fifteen days or several months seems less important than the remediation of the wetlands, Lake El Cascajo, the return of the birds, and a better functioning ecosystem. Let’s hope the same success can be enjoyed at Lake Titicaca.
There are more details in both pieces which I encourage you to read in their entirety.