Study of new integrated processes combining adsorption, membrane separation and flotation for heavy metal removal from wastewater Original Research Article

A new treatment process aimed at water and metal reuse was developed for the selective separation of heavy metals from wastewater to reduce costs and mitigate the environmental impact of wastewater pollutants. The process was divided into the following three stages: firstly, heavy metal bonding by a bonding agent, secondly, wastewater filtration to separate the loaded bonding agent by two variants: crossflow microfiltration for low-contaminated wastewater or a hybrid process combining flotation and submerged microfiltration for highly contaminated wastewater, and th irdly, bonding agent regeneration. In this work, synthetic zeolite P, selected as a bonding agent, was characterised and the possibilities for the separation of the zeolite loaded with metal are presented.