The food industry is also trying to restructure ingredients at the nanoscale so as to include particles of trace metals in food supplements and to produce less-fattening foods.

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Like other iron minerals, green rust readily absorbs dissolved elements onto its surface, but green rust is not only particularly efficient at this in many cases, it can also react with toxic dissolved trace metals to make them insoluble, and as a result, renders them in nontoxic forms.

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Rather, as a consequence of injecting water and sand into the shale formation to crack the rocks so gas and oil will flow, massive amounts of waste water comes back to the surface with significant amounts of contaminants as a result of leaching out salt, heavy metals and trace amounts of radioactive materials from the rock formation itself.

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There is no de minimis exemption for these metals if they are necessary for the functionality or production of the product, so even trace amounts count.

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