Metal Sequestration using Agricultural Wastes

Heavy metals have been excessively released into the environment due to rapid industrialization and have created a major global concern. These toxic metal ions such as chromium (Cr), lead (Pb), copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co), silver (Ag), cadmium (Cd) get introduced to the aquatic streams by means of various industrial activities and these usually contain metal-ion concentrations much higher than the permissible levels and do not degrade easily into harmless end products thus causing serious threats to human beings and organism. Recently attention has been diverted towards the biomaterials which are byproducts or the wastes from agricultural waste materials viz. rice husk, groundnut shells, saw dust, sugarcane bagasse, corncob, jatropha de-oiled cake etc. In the present book various natural low cost biosorbents such as sugarcane bagasse (SCB), jatropha de-oil cake (JOC), maize corncob (MCC) have been studied for the removal of the toxic metals from the aqueous streams using Optimization of process parameters by performing the statistically designed experiments, estimating the coefficient in a mathematical model and predicting their responses.