Waste tea residue as a low cost adsorbent for removal of hydralazine hydrochloride pharmaceutical pollutant from aqueous media: An environmental remediation

Abstract

Herein, we introduced simple, cheap, cost-effective and sustainable kitchen waste tea residue as an adsorbent. As per the literature survey, all the adsorbents have been used for wastewater treatment only as activated form. The first time, we have used similar material without any complicated activation process for the removal of pharmaceutical pollutant and it shows superior results than the existing materials which are the most attractive part of this work. It has shown an effective, low cost bio-sorbent to remove Hydralazine hydrochloride pharmaceutical pollutant from wastewater in aqueous media. The adsorbent waste tea residue was characterized by using Scanning Electron Microscopy, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The effect of pH, adsorbent dosage, contact time, and initial concentration on Hydralazine hydrochloride removal were also systematically studied. The adsorption process was studied using experimental data were fitted in both isotherms models. The maximum adsorption capacity of waste tea residue was found to be qe = 131.63 mg g−1 which is higher than the reported value. Furthermore, developed adsorbent was practically used to remove pharmaceutical pollutants from real samples (hospital and river wastewater) spiked with Hydralazine hydrochloride. Therefore, the waste tea residue displays the great potential to improve the quality of water contaminated with different type's pharmaceuticals in the environment.