What hydrogen peroxide has done for bleached blondes, it also can do -- with a little help -- for the inky-black wastewater released into rivers and streams by wood pulp mills and textile mills, Carnegie Mellon University chemists reported yesterday.

And the method they've developed for activating the common chemical doesn't just clean up industrial effluent, it can also kill dangerous anthrax spores and other water-borne infectious microbes, remove sulfur from diesel fuel and break apart toxic pesticides.

Hydrogen peroxide is a benign, slow-acting bleach that couldn't do this job alone. But combining it with special catalysts developed by Terry Collins and his colleagues at the CMU Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry creates a high-powered oxidizer.

It cleans. It disinfects. And, though not touched on a series of presentations yesterday at the American Chemical Society meeting in New York, it also may eventually make your wash turn out brighter, said Collins, a leading proponent of processes that reduce or eliminate dangerous chemicals, a movement called "green chemistry."

Catalysts are materials that speed up certain chemical reactions. Chemists have long used a wide array of sometimes exotic elements for this purpose. For the past 20 years, Collins has taken a different approach, more akin to nature's catalysts, called enzymes. Employing a smaller number of common elements but with more complex chemistry, he has been able to create a set of catalysts that can activate hydrogen peroxide.

Appropriately for catalysts being developed in Pittsburgh, these are built around atoms of iron.

A chemical scaffolding built around an iron atom alters its electrical properties in such a way that it can strip an oxygen atom out of the hydrogen peroxide molecule. This oxygen atom, now temporarily attached to the iron atom, is then available to react with and destroy an undesirable molecule. (Without its extra oxygen atom, the former hydrogen peroxide molecule becomes water.)

Collins, a past winner of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award and an associate editor of the journal Green Chemistry, said the catalysts generally work at room temperatures and pressures. He also said the team is taking care to ensure that in the process of eliminating pollutants, they don't produce dangerous byproducts, such as dioxins.

"He's been thoughtful in the process from beginning to end," said John Warner, a chemist at the University of Massachusetts. His insistence on using materials that are environmentally benign to make, and that leave behind benign byproducts, reflects a passion that students of Collins find inspiring, he added.

"They want to save the world after hearing him talk," Warner said.

Ultimately, Collins' goal is to develop a simple, cheap system that could be used to purify water, particularly in the Third World. Iron can be safely added to drinking water, he noted, and the amount of catalyst required would be minute.

In the meantime, the Collins team has shown that hydrogen peroxide and the iron-based catalyst is an effective killer of anthrax spores. The system actually was tested on a similar spore, called Bacillus atrophaeus, that is commonly used to simulate anthrax in lab experiments because it is less hazardous to humans, but just as hard to kill. Graduate student Deboshri Banerjee reported yesterday that the combination killed 99.999 percent of the spores in lab experiments sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Collins said the activated hydrogen peroxide might be added to water used to decontaminate surfaces following a biological attack employing anthrax spores. It might also be used to clean up other biological or chemical warfare agents, he noted.

Preliminary studies have shown promise in using it to break down organophosphorus compounds, a widely used class of agricultural pesticides, graduate student Arani Chanda reported yesterday. Small amounts might be sprayed on fields after a crop harvest to prevent the toxic pesticides from seeping into ground water or running off into waterways.

Collins has previously studied the use of activated hydrogen peroxide to replace chlorine-based bleaches used in wood pulping mills. That approach for bleaching pulp has been eclipsed by other methods, but it still holds promise for breaking down dyes and colorants that pollute the wastewater from pulping mills and textile mills -- the subject of two presentations yesterday.

Colored water is not regulated in many areas, he said, but some states, such as Massachusetts, are considering it. Colin Horwitz, a research assistant professor involved in field experiments at a textile mill in Massachusetts and a pulp mill in New Zealand, said injecting the catalysts and hydrogen peroxide at the end of the discharge pipe has proven effective in eliminating much of the color.

Horwitz also presented results of lab experiments showing that the catalyst system can be used to remove sulfur from diesel fuel, producing a fuel that produces less soot when it burns.

Seven patents have been issued for the catalysts and CMU is actively negotiating licenses for the technology with several companies, including companies interested in using it as a laundry bleach. Because of the negotiations, Collins said he couldn't speculate about the costs of producing the catalysts. He emphasized, however, that only minute amounts of catalyst are necessary for most applications, which should keep the costs manageable.

Warner, the UMass chemist, said cheaper alternatives may exist to Collins' system in some cases, but in the long run the CMU approach is likely to prove superior.

"The market would be wise to recognize the importance of these discoveries," said Paul Anastas, a staff member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, whose responsibilities include green chemistry.. "There are wrong ways to do things and this is one of the right ways."