Removal of copper (II) from wastewater using green vegetable waste derived activated carbon: An approach to equilibrium and kinetic study

AbstractThe present paper reports on the use of modified activated carbon as an environmental friendly adsorbent, obtained from a green vegetable waste, for the removal of copper (II) from wastewaters. The activated carbon was prepared from green vegetable waste by KOH treatment for 24h at 60°C and thereafter evaluated by studying the effects of pH, contact time, dosage and initial concentration and optimized in the batch processing mode. The morphological and chemical changes in activated carbon were fully characterized by SEM, TGA, DSC, FTIR techniques. The Langmuir isotherm, yielded adsorption capacity of 75.0mgg−1 for a pseudo-second-order model. Overall, these results suggest that green vegetable waste derived activated carbon as a low-cost adsorbent for the removal of copper (II) will be useful for future scale-up for the tertiary treatment of wastewater