Waste water treatment with agricultural by-products: An investigation with date pit powder

Water is very precious and inevitable for every living objects including human beings. Fresh water sources are becoming scarce and all over the world a quantum of research is being carried out on water. Huge quantity of waste water is generated by us every day and there are various methods to regenerate safe and pure drinking water from these waste waters. There is a growing interest to treat waste water from both domestic and industrial sources. Researchers all over the world are continuously trying to develop low cost filtration system using various adsorbents. Agricultural waste products are being used as adsorbents and gaining momentum because of various attractive factors such as easy availability, low cost, non-toxic nature etc. In the present investigation, date pit (date stone) powder is used an adsorbent to remove Pb (II) ions from its aqueous solution in a laboratory column filtration setup. The concentration of Pb (II) ions from the effluent was analyzed using atomic absorption spectroscopy. The adsorbent material was studied by changing the bed size under a constant flow rate. Mathematical modeling was carried out using Thomas model equation. The analysis revealed that date pit powder can be successfully used in a column filtration set-up to remove Pb (II) ions from the waste water streams with high efficiency