The Extract of Lead from Lead Contaminated Soil and its Enrichment

Abstract

It is important to establish washing methods for contaminated soils by toxic metals such as lead in rifle shooting areas. In the lead-contaminated soils weathered after a long period, metal lead is extracted as ion, and is penetrated into the ground, depositing on the surface of soil particles or immersing into the pores of the particles mainly as a lead carbonate. Therefore it is difficult to remove lead from the weathered contaminated soils by conventional soil washing techniques such as sizing or gravity separation. In this study, a new method is proposed for removing lead from the contaminated soil. Lead components in the soil are extracted into the solution by sodium citrate as a chelating agent, and the extracted lead is precipitated on the surface of iron powder by redox reaction. Then the iron powder is recovered by physical separation techniques such as magnetic separation. Thermodynamic calculation showed that removal efficiency of lead was higher when leaching iron powder, sodium citrate, and lead carbonate simultaneously than when leaching first lead carbonate by sodium citrate and then adding iron powder to the lead citrate solution. This calculation result was supported by ICP and XRD results. The XRD pattern for the iron powder recovered by magnetic separation indicated that lead is present as solid form on the powder. The recovered powder would be used as a lead source in smelting process.