Banana Peel as a Biosorbent in Removal of Nitrate from Water

Abstract

The contamination of water by nitrate is profound. Cost-effective and safe water treatment methods are required to remove nitrate from water. Biosorption is one of the methods which meet above objectives in addition to its other advantages like cheap adsorbents which can be reused, simple process with less wastage production and overall highly efficient. The present work studies the feasibility of use of banana peel as a Biosorbent in removal of nitrate from the drinking water. The effect of different parameters like contact time, adsorbent size fraction, adsorbent dosage, nitrate concentration was studied. The removal efficiency of nearly 80% was achieved when 0.05g of banana peel powder of 106 μm size fraction was used as adsorbent to treat 100 ml of water sample of 200 mg/l nitrate concentration for a contact time of 0.5h