Abstract
A huge amount of waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) was produced while the electronic manufacturing industry developed rapidly. WPCBs mainly consist of organic compounds, which makes it possible to prepare them into porous carbon as valuable adsorbent. However, WPCBs are also rich in valuable metals. Cu makes up the most of these metals. It is worth studying whether the residual metal will affect the application of carbon materials. In this study, the porous active carbon (AC) was prepared from WPCBs as an adsorbent. Sulfadiazine (SD), a widely detected antibiotic contaminant, was used as a target pollutant. Nitric acid (HNO3) was used to modify AC (AC-HNO3) to remove the residual Cu. The experiment results showed that the adsorption kinetics of SD by AC (k = 0.0025) and AC-HNO3 (k = 0.0029) can be described better using a pseudo-second-order kinetic equation. The adsorption isotherms of AC and AC-HNO3 on SD could be fitted by the Langmuir model. AC had a larger adsorption capacity than AC-HNO3. Density functional theory (DFT) calculation results suggested that the −OH group and Cu on the surface of AC could be the adsorption sites and promote the SD adsorption. This work provides practical methods to recycle WPCBs into wealth and realized waste control by waste.
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