Abstract
As a natural polymer, leather and its associated industries are known to be the leading economic sector in many countries. However, the huge amounts of leather waste generated from the leather industry causes severe environmental pollution. Herein, cow leather (CL) powders were prepared using a homemade machine and used as a low-cost adsorbent for the effective removal of reactive dyes from wastewater. The as-prepared CL powders exhibited dot-like, rod-like, and fiber-like morphologies. A Fourier transform infrared analysis and an x-ray diffraction analysis demonstrated that the CL powders retained the main structure of the protein contained in it. In addition, an improvement in thermal stability was also observed for the CL powders. Dye adsorption experiments indicate that the CL powders showed the highly effective removal of C.I. Reactive Red 120 (RR120), C.I. Reactive Yellow 127 (RY127), and C.I. Reactive Blue 222 (RB222) with the adsorption capacity of 167.0, 178.9, and 129.6 mg·g−1, respectively. The Langmuir, pseudo-second order, and intraparticle diffusion models could well depict the adsorption equilibrium and kinetics of CL powders toward the investigated reactive dyes. The as-prepared CL powders can be used as a potential adsorbent in the treatment of dye contaminated wastewater. Future studies will mainly focus on the application of the adsorbed CL powders for the pigment printing of textile materials.
Highlights
Water security is certain to be a major topic facing humanity
Fine cow leather (CL) powders were successfully prepared using a homemade−1instrument at room
An improvement in thermal stability was observed for the CL powders
Summary
Water security is certain to be a major topic facing humanity. It has been reported that the freshwater ecosystem only occupies nearly 1% of the Earth’s surface [1]. We developed an environmentally friendly dyeing method to conserve water consumption and mitigate water pollution in our previous study [5], the elimination of dyes in conventional textile effluents is still of great importance to the whole textile industry. Various technologies such as adsorption [6,7,8,9], photochemical degradation [10,11], membrane filtration [12,13], and biological treatment [14,15] have become available for color removal
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