Adsorption of Heavy Metal (Cu2+, Ni2+ and Zn2+) from Synthetic Waste Water by Tea Waste Adsorbent

Industrial waste constitutes the major source of various kinds of metal pollution in natural water. There are at least 20 metals which cannot be degraded or destroyed. The important toxic metals are Cu, Ni and Zn. There are numerous methods currently employed to remove and recover the metals from our environment and many physicochemical methods have been proposed for their removal from wastewater. Adsorption is one of the alternatives for such cases and is an effective purification and separation technique used in industry especially in water and wastewater treatments. Cost is an important parameter for comparing the adsorbent materials. Therefore, there is increasing research interest in using alternative low-cost adsorbents. The use of tea waste as the low-cost adsorbents was investigated as a replacement for current costly methods of removing heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. The experiment results showed that maximum removal of Nickel ion by tea waste is 94% and for Copper & Zinc ion are 89% & 90% respectively at optimum condition.