REMOVAL OF MERCURY FROM WASTEWATER USE OF GREEN ADSORBENTS - A REVIEW

Heavy metals are not biodegradable and tend to accumulate in the water bodies, in living organisms, causing carcinogenic diseases and different kind of disorders in humans and animals. Effluents from large number of industries contain heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. These are the kind of treatment processes for waste water contamination with heavy metal include chemical precipitation, membrane separation, conventional coagulation, lime softening, ion exchange, reverse osmosis and adsorption. Activated carbon has been generally used for adsorption. But the higher cost and the tedious method of regeneration inhibits its use. In comparison with activated carbon, it has significantly observed that the low cost industrial and agro based waste material in their raw or chemically activated form has been found which exhibit great potentiality to be used as solvent. This paper presents a review of the available literature using agro based waste material for the removal of heavy metals, mercury in particular.