Copper and Zinc Removal from Contaminated Water Using Coffee Waste

Aim: The aim of this research is to evaluate the selectivity in metal removal by coffee waste from binary-metal polluted water from contaminated water.

Place: The work was done at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA, USA.

Duration: The project was carried out between November and December 2014.

There are reports that suggest that there is a steady increase in industrial effluents containing heavy metals that are being dumped into the water. The presence of these heavy metals in water is harmful for the environment, human health, and aquatic life. It is necessary to develop cheap and friendly method such as agricultural waste to remove these metals. These industrial effluents are known to contain more than one heavy metal; thus, the paper presented here examines the effects of dose of adsorbent, metal type, and the presence of another metal on heavy metal removal by coffee waste. Results showed that (1) increasing the dose of coffee waste increases the removal of heavy metal from the samples. As the adsorbent dose increased from 1 g - 4 g, the percent metal removal increased from 73-92% for copper and 50-74% for zinc from single-metal solutions and from 26-78% for copper and 18-58% for zinc from binary-metal solutions (2) there is selectivity in favor of copper removal from the binary metal mixture by the coffee waste as shown above (3) ion type effect was observed in that more copper was adsorbed from both mono and binary metal samples (4) the presence of another metal as impurity increased metal adsorption hence, more adsorption occurred from binary metal solution than from the single metal solution.