EFFICIENCY OF LOW COST ADSORBENTS FOR REMOVAL LEAD, COPPER AND CHROMIUM FROM WASTEWATER

The adsorption efficiency of water hyacinth, eggshell powder and kyanite for the removal of lead, copper and chromium were studied. Kyanite as a commercial mineral has been utilized as an adsorbent, eggshell powder and water hyacinth which have many functional groups capable of binding to the metal cations. The research is a batch scale experiment using different amounts of adsorbents in solution with five different concentrations (20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 mg/L) of each metal and in mixed combination.Two main things comes out by the above study, first, removal adsorption depends on the amount of adsorbent.The adsorption efficiency of Cu was increased from 80.5% to 95.2% ; 75.3% to 91.1% and 90.2% to 100% for Cu and 78.5% to 91.6% ; 72.9% to 90.1% and 88.7% to 97.6% for Cr. Also, about 90.2% to 97.2% , 87.5% to 95.1% and 92.6% to 100% Pb removal achieved by using 2 to 5 g adsorbent for solution having concentration of 20 and 40 mg/L of Pb for each water hyacinth, eggshell powder and kyanite in the same solution (20 mg/L). Second, it was also found for the mixture of these metals a decrease about 1.78% , 8.02% and 2.16% for lead, whereas Cu and Cr adsorption decreased about 2.74 % , 6.25% and 2.44% ; 12.11%, 7.41 % and 4.63 % respectively, to mixed metal solution, which clearly indicated that the presence of more metals in the solution will decrease the adsorption efficiency and it also found increasing the adsorbent dose, the removal efficiency of adsorbents increases, while adsorption efficiency decreases with increasing the various concentration.