(86f) Cost and Product Efficiency of Metal Biosorption From Sargassum Fluitans and the Environmental Application

Heavy metals pose a grave risk to companies as they prove to be harmful to the environment due to their non-biodegradable and toxic content. Through biosorption, heavy metals such as Cadmium, Zinc, Lead, Copper, etc can be removed from effluent streams and recovered as a cost-effective solution. Scale up technologies allow for industrial applications that assist in meeting government regulations, and show an effort towards environmental sustainability. Conventional ion-exchange systems cannot compare to the cost-efficiency of metal biosorption, and, based on modeling systems, are not comparable to the results of equilibrium uptake of heavy metals. This report summarizes the modeling procedure, cost effectiveness, and overall efficiency of using metal biosorption as an environmentally stable solution to recovering heavy metals from contaminated effluent streams. Metal Biosorption, in short, is the removal of metal ions from wastewater or effluent streams. To do so, alginic materials or dead biomass is used to remove the ions by binding in the resin state and not allowing the toxic, non-biodegradable materials to enter the ecosystems surrounding the plant facilities. The advantage of using metal biosorption in place of ion exchange, activated carbon treatment or membrane technologies such as electro-dialysis or reverse osmosis is it can be operated under a variety of pH and temperature ranges. Another potent advantage is that the raw materials used as biosorbents are economically feasible and anywhere up to one tenth the cost of typical sorbents and come from renewable biomass such as marine algae. Metal biosorption occurs in four stages. The first of the stages is the biosorption of residual metals from the effluent streams, followed by a pH adjustment neutralization of the process effluent in a separate tank. The third stage is desorption which removes the metal from the biosorption column in a concentrated waste stream and the fourth and final stage is rinsing by water inside the column to re-prepare the biosorbent. Metal biosorption equipment is generally interchangeable with ion-exchange equipment but uses much cheaper and renewable sorbents.