An Environmentally Benign Approach for As (V) Absorption from Wastewater Using Untreated Coffee Grounds—Preliminary Results

Abstract

Arsenic contamination of water is a worldwide issue due to its severe effects on the human body. Coffee grounds are a porous material with network structures, making it absorb other substances such as some gases or elements. In this research, renewable coffee wastes were used as an adsorbent to extract arsenic (As) from wastewater. In order to evaluate the usefulness of untreated coffee grounds, a series of preliminary tests for attachment of arsenic to coffee grounds were provided. The Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area and adsorption-desorption isotherms of an untreated coffee ground obtained from N 2 gas adsorption were provided, and pore sizes was obtained using Barrett-Joyner-Halenda (BJH) method. The adsorption capacities of the coffee waste were verified through a series of experimental processes changing the conditions such as concentration of arsenic, initial amount of coffee grounds, and pH. The maximum absorption concentration of 6.44 mg/L on 1 g of coffee grounds at 1.00 mM of arsenic solution was observed. It was demonstrated that the modification by the cation species or pretreatment processes, such as calcination, will be necessary to enhance the absorption capacity for the extraction of arsenic.

The Status of Arsenic Pollution in the Greek and Cyprus Environment: An Overview

“…Nam et al [101] used renewable coffee wastes as an adsorbent to extract As from wastewater. Nam et al [101] recorded a maximum absorption concentration of 6.44 mg As L −1 on 1 gm of coffee grounds at 1.00 mM of As solution.…”

Residual biomass of coffee as a binding agent in diffusive gradients in thin-films technique for Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn measurement in waters

“…6 the use of spent coffee grounds has been reported to uptake As, Cd, Cr (VI), Cu, Pb, Hg, Ni and Zn [25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Removal and Potential Recovery of Dissolved Metals from Acid Sulfate Soil Drainage by Spent Coffee-Grounds and Dissolved Organic Carbon

“…Multiple mechanisms could explain the decreasing adsorption of soluble Fe with higher SCGs addition. The adsorption times used in this study are higher than in previous SCGs adsorption studies (Lavecchia et al 2016;Nam et al 2017;Sukhbaatar et al 2021), which could cause desorption. However, Kyzas et al (2012) reports the adsorption of soluble metals onto SCGs under experimental adsorption times up to 24 h, which do not indicate desorption of soluble metals from the SCGs.…”

“…Biosubstances, such as spent coffee-grounds (SCGs), tea, rice hulls (Utomo and Hunter 2006;Kaikake et al 2007;Kyzas 2012;Nam et al 2017), and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) such as humic acid (Klučáková and Pavlíková 2017) have been used to remove metals from metal-rich solutions. In addition, SCGs have a broad range of applications, such as removal of dyes (Kyzas et al 2012;Sartape et al 2017) and metals (Nam et al 2017) from solutions, and used as sources of energy (Kim and Oh 2021), bio-oil (Yang et al 2016), biochar (Maree et al 2020), biocrude production (Yang et al 2019;Zhang et al 2021), substitute for coking coal (Maree et al 2020) and provides adsorption sites for soluble metals and, therefore, be used for water treatment (Utomo and Hunter 2006;Kyzas 2012;Nam et al 2017). Furthermore, with the worldwide coffee consumption reported to be over 11 billion tons/year (Jagdale et al 2019), SCGs have great potential for being used as alternative biosorbents for remediation (McNutt and He 2019).…”