Study on Olea europaea as an Adsorbent to Remove Heavy Metal from Wastewater

Abstract

Liquid wastewater is essentially the water disposal of the community after the pure water has been used in a variety of applications. In recent years, heavy metal concentrations, besides other pollutants, have increased to reach dangerous levels for living environment in many regions. Among the heavy metals lead has the most damaging effects on human health. It can enter a human body through uptake of food (65%), water (20%) and air (15%).  With this background certain low cost and easily available biosorbent like Olea Europaea was used and reported in this study. The scope of the present study is to remove Lead from its aqueous solution using Olea Europaea Resin as biosorbent. The Langmuir, Freundlich, Tempkin and Dubinin-Radushkevich (D-R) models were used to describe the biosorption equilibrium of Lead Olea EuropaeaResin biosorbent.The results showed that the biosorption capacity of Olea Europaea Resin biosorbent was more for Lead removal around 34.2 mg/g and the biosorption followed the Langmuir isotherm. The kinetic models showed that the pseudo-second order rate expression was found to represent well with the biosorption data for the biosorbent.