Metal Ion Separation with Functional Adsorbents and Phytoremediation Used as Sustainable Technologies

Abstract

The amounts of “Electronic wastes” including heavy metals are increasing day by day. Such waste is in the rich resource of various metals having the precious metals. Therefore, these wastes are considered as urban mine, if people successfully can separate them to each source. In sustainable viewpoints, separation technologies applied for such electronics waste are essential and important to efficiently recover various metals at a low concentration from these sources. This chapter reviews functional adsorbents made of polymers, ionic liquid, and dendrimer. Also, membrane technology is introduced as separation toll for heavy metals. Among them, topics of phytoremediation are made as an effective sustainable method, utilizing certain plants to clean up the environmental contaminants. Here, plants are able to remove harmful chemicals such as metals, which are present in the soil, when their roots absorb water and nutrients from the contaminated soil, sediment and surface, or ground water. The contaminants are removed by trapping them into harvestable plant biomass. Furthermore, cleanup methods of environments and recovery of precious and rare metals are mentioned for sources of urban and submarine mines with low cost and high recovery efficiency.