REMOVAL OF PHENOL FROM WASTE WATER USING MANGO PEEL

Phenolic compounds are found in wastewaters of various industries such as petroleum refining, coal conversion, plastics, textiles, iron and steel manufacturing as well as pulp and paper manufacturing. It is very important to remove phenols and aromatic compounds from contaminated water before discharge into any natural water because of their toxicity to aquatic organisms. Conventional processes for removal of phenols from industrial wastewaters including extraction, adsorption on activated carbon, bacterial and chemical oxidation, electrochemical techniques, irradiation, etc. suffer from serious shortcomings such as high costs, incompleteness of purification, formation of hazardous by-products, low efficiency and applicability to a limited concentration range (these methods are not suitable for treating moderate to high concentrations of phenols). In this project, we have used mango peel as an adsorbent to treat the synthetically prepared phenol solution. The effectiveness of the adsorbent is measured by finding out the concentration of phenol in the treated solution by the use of ultraviolet spectroscopy. The mango peel adsorbent was activated using three different activating agents and the following parameters of adsorption have been studied: effect of contact time, effect of pH, effect of temperature, and effect of adsorbent dosage.