Tea Waste as a Low Cost Adsorbent for the Removal of Cu, Fe, Ni Metals

Rapid industrialization has led to increase disposal of heavy metals into the environment. The tremendous increase in use of heavy metals over the past few decades has inevitably resulted in an increased flux of metallic substances in the aquatic environment. There are numerous methods currently employed to remove and recover the metals from our environment and many physico-chemical methods have been proposed for their removal from wastewater. Adsorption is one of the alternatives for such cases and is an effective purification and separation technique used in industry especially in water and wastewater treatments. Cost is an important parameter for comparing the adsorbent materials. Therefore, there is increasing research interest in using alternative low-cost adsorbents. The use of tea waste as the low-cost adsorbents was investigated as a replacement for current costly methods of removing heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. Experiment results showed that removal of Copper ion by tea waste at optimum condition (60 min. contact time, 0.4g/100mladsorbent dose and 10ppm concentration) is maximum and then for Nickel & Ferrous ion respectively at optimum condition.