Removal of lead from drinking water by bioadsorption technique: An eco-friendly approach

Abstract

India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, accounting for 25 per cent of the world’s extracted groundwater. Contamination of water bodies is the main problem for degrading the potable water quality in India. The contaminants, mainly cadmium, chromium, nickel, lead, zinc, copper, calcium, fluoride, nitrates, etc. have a significant impact on waters. There have been several advancements in technology for removal or reduction of these contaminants in water such as reverse osmosis, UV filtration, distillation and ion exchange. But these methods are not found to be eco-friendly and cost-effective. This paper elaborates various techniques of organic nature that can be used to reduce/ remove the heavy metals from water bodies using orange peels as a bioadsorbent and detailed experimentation for the removal of lead ion concentration from water. In the present study, synthetic water with various heavy metals of known concentration was treated by a bioadsorbent (orange peels) by changing various parameters such as adsorbent particle size, dose, initial pH, etc. At pH 7, dose 0.5 g, and adsorbent particle size of 250 µm, a drastic reduction in the concentration of lead from 10 ppm to 0.213 ppm in 50 mL synthetic sample was observed.