Water Adsorptions

Water is essential to our life as water is one of the human’s basic needs besides food, shelter and clothes. Water covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. Most of the organisms can survive longer without food but cannot survive if without water. Water is one of our most valuable resources (Stapleton, 2004). All living organisms require water to sustain life and human body consists of 57 percent of water (Guyton, 1991). According to (Yuk Feng Huang, 2005), rapid urbanisation and growth of the population has led to both the ever increasing demand for water consumption and the levels of water pollution in Malaysia. Rapid development has produced great amounts of human wastes, including domestic, industrial and commercial wastes which inevitably

Among these methods, adsorption process is considered better because it has been investigated by ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "DOI" : "10.1016/j.cej.2010.01.007", "ISBN" : "1385-8947", "ISSN" : "13858947", "abstract" : "Adsorption process has been proven one of the best water treatment technologies around the world and activated carbon is undoubtedly considered as universal adsorbent for the removal of diverse types of pollutants from water. However, widespread use of commercial activated carbon is sometimes restricted due to its higher costs. Attempts have been made to develop inexpensive adsorbents utilizing numerous agro-industrial and municipal waste materials. Use of waste materials as low-cost adsorbents is attractive due to their contribution in the reduction of costs for waste disposal, therefore contributing to environmental protection. In this review, an extensive list of low-cost adsorbents (prepared by utilizing different types of waste materials) from vast literature has been compiled and their adsorption capacities for various aquatic pollutants as available in the literature are presented. It is evident from the literature survey that various

However, widespread use of commercial activated carbon is sometimes restricted due to its higher costs. Attempts have been made to develop inexpensive adsorbents utilizing numerous agro-industrial and municipal waste materials. Use of waste materials as low-cost adsorbents is attractive due to their contribution in the reduction of costs for waste disposal, therefore contributing to environmental protection. In this review, an extensive list of low-cost adsorbents (prepared by utilizing different types of waste materials) from vast literature has been compiled and their adsorption capacities for various aquatic pollutants as available in the literature are presented. It is evident from the literature survey that various low-cost adsorbents have shown good potential for the removal of various aquatic pollutants. However, there are few issues and drawbacks on the use of low-cost adsorbents in water treatment that have been discussed in this paper. Additionally, more research is needed to find the practical utility of low-cost adsorbents on commercial scale. \u00a9 2010 Elsevier B.V. All