Porous fibrous bacterial cellulose/La(OH)3 membrane for superior phosphate removal from water

Lanthanum (La)-based nanoparticles (NPs) are promising candidates for phosphate removal owing to their inherently high affinity towards phosphate. However, significant challenges remain to be addressed before their practical deployment, especially the problems associated with their aggregation. Herein, we fabricated a high-efficient sorbent for phosphate removal through in-situ synthesizing La(OH)3 NPs on a natural support, bacterial cellulose (BC), which is pre-modified with polyethyleneimine. The resultant La(OH)3 NPs-immobilized BC with different La contents (BPLa-X) exhibited a highly fibrous porous structure, in which BPLa-3 was selected for further phosphate adsorption studies. BPLa-3 demonstrated a high adsorption capacity of 125.5 mg P g-1, and high adsorption selectivity due to the large surface area and abundant exposed active adsorption sites for phosphate. Additionally, BPLa-3 also displayed high reusability and still possessed high adsorption capacity after four consecutive cycles of adsorption-desorption. Therefore, the present adsorbent is believed to be a promising candidate for practical phosphate removal.