Green Adsorbents for Wastewaters: A Critical Review
#MMPMID28788460
Kyzas GZ
; Kostoglou M
Materials (Basel)
2014[Jan]; 7
(1
): 333-364
PMID28788460
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One of the most serious environmental problems is the existence of hazardous and
toxic pollutants in industrial wastewaters. The major hindrance is the
simultaneous existence of many/different types of pollutants as (i) dyes; (ii)
heavy metals; (iii) phenols; (iv) pesticides and (v) pharmaceuticals. Adsorption
is considered to be one of the most promising techniques for wastewater treatment
over the last decades. The economic crisis of the 2000s led researchers to turn
their interest in adsorbent materials with lower cost. In this review article, a
new term will be introduced, which is called "green adsorption". Under this term,
it is meant the low-cost materials originated from: (i) agricultural sources and
by-products (fruits, vegetables, foods); (ii) agricultural residues and wastes;
(iii) low-cost sources from which most complex adsorbents will be produced (i.e.,
activated carbons after pyrolysis of agricultural sources). These "green
adsorbents" are expected to be inferior (regarding their adsorption capacity) to
the super-adsorbents of previous literature (complex materials as modified
chitosans, activated carbons, structurally-complex inorganic composite materials
etc.), but their cost-potential makes them competitive. This review is a critical
approach to green adsorption, discussing many different (maybe in some occasions
doubtful) topics such as: (i) adsorption capacity; (ii) kinetic modeling (given
the ultimate target to scale up the batch experimental data to fixed-bed column
calculations for designing/optimizing commercial processes) and (iii) critical
techno-economical data of green adsorption processes in order to scale-up
experiments (from lab to industry) with economic analysis and perspectives of the
use of green adsorbents.
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