“…One of the biggest advantages of clays that have to be used as raw materials in the synthesis of zeolites is their relatively low cost, which allows applications to be industrially feasible. Clays, such as clay minerals such as kaolinite (Breck, 1974;Barrer, 1982;Boukadir et al, 2002;Ríos, 2008;Ríos et al, 2009Ríos et al, , 2011, halloysite (Klimkiewicz & Drąg 2004;Zhao et al, 2010), illite (Mezni et al, 2011), montmorillonite (Song & Guo, 1997;Ruiz et al, 1997;Cañizares et al, 2000;Boukadir et al, 2002), vermiculite (Johnson & Worrall, 2007), serpentine (Saada et al, 2009) and interstratified illite-smectite (Baccouche et al, 1998), have been used as the Al and Si sources for the synthesis of several types of zeolites. Due to their exceptional properties, zeolites have been widely used as catalysts, adsorbents and ion exchangers (Breck, 1974).…”