Comparing the Efficiencies of the Removal of Cadmium from Industrial Wastewater Using Zeolites

The presence of heavy metals in industrial wastewater needed to be removed in other to control pollution which has been caused as a result of human and industrial activities. Several adsorbents have been used for the remediation process but with this particular research work, Zeolites were used. They were synthesized hydrothermally from various locally available raw materials namely rice husk, corn stalk, corn husk, and kaolin. They were characterized using their FTIR to determine the functional groups on the material synthesized and also their adsorptive activities were compared with industrially synthesized Zeolite X. A very strong peak at 1052 cm-1 is as a result of the asymmetric vibrations of the internal T-O tetrahedron with a weak symmetric T-O stretching vibration recorded at 797 cm-1. Another strong peak was observed at 445 cm-1 as a result of the O-T-O bending vibration which confirms the presence of a five-membered structure. The adsorptive properties of the synthesized Zeolites were evaluated by using them to remove Cadmium ions from solution and their percentage removals were determined. Similarly, their adsorption kinetics were also determined and was observed the R2 values to be 0.9093 and 0.9454 for Corn husk and Cornstalk for the first order and the second order with R2 values of 1 for rice husk, kaolin and corn stalk.