Abstract
The heavy use of antibiotics in medicine, stock farming and agriculture production has led to their gradual accumulation in environmental media, which poses a serious threat to ecological environment and human safety. As an efficient and promising catalyst for the degradation of antibiotics, nanoscale zero valent iron (nZVI) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this study, sepiolite nanofiber supported zero valent iron (nZVI/SEP) composite was prepared via a facile and environmentally friendly method. The nZVI particles (with size of 20–60 nm) were dispersed evenly on the surface of sepiolite nanofibers, and the catalytic performance for the removal of tetracycline hydrochloride (TC-HCl) in aqueous system was investigated. The effect of nZVI loading amount, catalyst dosage, H2O2 concentration and pH on the removal efficiency of TC-HCl were studied. It was revealed that the sepiolite supporter effectively inhibited the agglomeration of nZVI particles and increased the contact area between contaminant and the active sites, resulting in the higher catalytic performance than pure nZVI material. The TC-HCl removal efficiency of nZVI/SEP composite was up to 92.67% when TC-HCl concentration of 20 mg/L, catalyst dosage of 1.0 g/L, H2O2 concentration of 1.0 mM, pH value of 7. Therefore, the nZVI/SEP composites possess high catalytic activity for TC-HCl removal and have great application prospects in antibiotic wastewater treatment.
Highlights
In recent years, refractory organic pollutants such as antibiotics (Ouyang et al, 2019; Chen et al, 2020a), mycotoxins (Li et al, 2018; Sun et al, 2020) and drugs (Daneshkhah et al, 2017; Phasuphan et al, 2019) have become emerging environmental issues because of the rapid development of pharmaceutical industry, agriculture and animal husbandry
The X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern shows the characteristic peak of sepiolite at 2θ 7.3°, which is consistent with the reference material
The zero valent iron particles were successfully loaded via green method onto sepiolite nanofiber at different nanoscale zero valent iron (nZVI)/SEP ratios
Summary
Refractory organic pollutants such as antibiotics (Ouyang et al, 2019; Chen et al, 2020a), mycotoxins (Li et al, 2018; Sun et al, 2020) and drugs (Daneshkhah et al, 2017; Phasuphan et al, 2019) have become emerging environmental issues because of the rapid development of pharmaceutical industry, agriculture and animal husbandry. The abuse of antibiotics has led to the gradual accumulation in soil and water environments, which enhances the bacterial resistance and endangers various ecosystems (Dong et al, 2018; Pirsaheb et al, 2019). Tetracycline accumulation in the environment readily leads to cause bacterial resistance to antibiotics, which poses a serious threat to human health and ecological security. The removal of antibiotics has been paid close attention by the scientific researchers in the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine and environment. General technologies, such as biodegradation, absorption, coagulation and sedimentation, have a limited impact on the removal of various antibiotics. The advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) can generate highly reactive free radicals to efficiently degrade antibiotics (Huang et al, 2020)
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