“…Sulfuric acid is widely used in numerous applications, including solvent extraction (Li et al, 2012); electroplating; acid leaching of metals (Nenov et al, 1997;Wei et al, 2010); electrolysis; lead-acid storage batteries (Jiang et al, 2010); and the production processes for titanium pigment (Xu and Yang, 2001), acetylene (Plotnikova et al, 2001), ethylene (Yurin et al, 1992), anthraquinone (Zhang et al, 2000), and p-nitrotoluene-2-sulfonic acid (Chen, 2009;Lee et al, 1974;Song et al, 2013;Weissermel and Arpe, 1997). Consequently, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of residual free sulfuric acid solutions are produced annually (Fa, 1999;Liu, 2002;Sarkar et al, 2011).…”