Electroplating Industrial Effluents Treatment using Low Cost Adsorbent

Electroplating industrial effluents are highly toxic as they contaminating the existing water resources by discharging waste water containing organics, color and heavy metals. In general, heavy metals are not biodegradable and tend to accumulate in living organisms, causing various diseases and disorders. Safe and effective disposal of waste water containing heavy metals is always a challenging task for industrialists and environmentalists due to the fact that the cost effective treatment alternatives are not available. Therefore the treatment of these industrial wastewaters is important. On the other hand, fly ash is major pollutant generated in coal based thermal power plants. In India, 70-80 million tones of fly ash is expected generated by turn of the century and its disposal is a serious problem. The fly ash has been found potentially useful as an adsorbent for the heavy metal ions removal. Also, saw dust and bagasse are naturally occurring polymeric materials with adsorption affinity of heavy metals. In the present work, batch and column adsorption studies were made in treating metal solutions containing Chromium, Cadmium, Zinc, Copper and Nickel by using fly ash.