Lead Adsorption onto Clay Soil Treated with Sugarcane Organic Waste Biochar

Abstract

This work aims to maximize the utilization of sugar cane cultivation and manufacture waste in Aswan Governorate, Egypt and turn it into biochar, which can be used to clean the environment from dangerous metals. Sugarcane organic wastes (filter cake, bagasse and sphere) biochars as waste bio-adsorbent materials were obtained using the pyrolysis at 350 and 700°C and 90 min residence time under limited oxygen conditions. Two batch trails were conducted to study the effects of biochar pH and shaking time on the adsorption of Pb ion from solution in precedence of soil and biochar. Models to study the kinetics of the adsorption process as pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order models were used.The results showed that the absorbed or precipitated (at high suspension pH) amount of Pb decreased in the order: soil treated with biochar bagasse pyrolysis at 350°C (BB350) > soil treated with biochar sphere pyrolysis at 350°C (SB350) > soil treated with biochar filter cake pyrolysis at 350°C (FB350) > soil only. At pH 9 maximum amounts of Pb of 1.794, 1.706 and 1.688 mg/g were adsorbed or precipitated on the soil treated with BB350, SB350 and FB350 respectively. However, Pb was maximum adsorbed or precipitated (1.33 mg/g) on the soil only at pH 8. The highest removal efficiency of Pb2+ from the solution was85% with treated the soil with SB350 while the lowest one was 55.5% occurred with the soil that was not treated with biochar at a shaking time of 80 minutes. The adsorption of Pb2+ by the soil in presence or absence biochars different fitted the pseudo second order kinetic model for all tested treatments (R2 ranged from 0.9901 for the soil treated with BB350 to 0.9994 for that treated with SB350).