Potential small scale sea water reclamation from plastic waste contamination

Abstract

Plastics have become a potential source of contaminants in addition to being a universal environmental eyesore due to its global occurrence in every waste stream. Copper (Cu) adsorbed at high concentrations can be damaging to health. The optimum parameter conditions for the minimization of Cu from contaminated water due to plastic using coconut shell activated carbon were investigated. The influence of two experimental variables (adsorbent dosage and pH) were analyzed by the application of response surface methodology (RSM) and central composite design (CCD). Quadratic models were developed for efficiency improvement in treatment. The optimal removal settings attained were the adsorbent dosage of 26.58 g and 150rpm shaking speed, achieving 89.62% removal with a desirability value of 0.999. The predicted compared to the experimental data revealed that the experimental values are relatively in close agreement with the predicted results, which therefore define that the generated model has encapsulated the correlation between the adsorption variables and the response. The Langmuir model was best fitted to the experimental data.