Biosorption of ferrum (II) from industrial wastewater by using water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica)

The increasing amount of industrial wastewater discharges to the environment have contibuted to the increasing amount heavy metals in clean water sources such as river, pond and lake. This matter is seems to be a major problem as heavy metals in water source can cause illnesses, diseases and disorders to human and other organism. Thus, industrial wastewaters containing heavy metal should be treated before discharged to the environment. However, treatment methods of removing heavy metals are very costly and due to requirement discovery of new method that is not costly and also efficient. This research is about the capability of a new technique called biosorption in removing ferrum from industrial wastewater. The biological material that is used as the biosorbent is water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) and the sample of wastewater is obtained from Huntsman Tioxide (M) Sdn. Bhd. The analysis of the wastewater shows that the concentration of ferrum is 16 g/L. The parameters analyzed in this research is the amount of biosorbent used to absorb ferrum from the wastewater and the time contact between biosorbents and wastewater. The experiment is done by planting water spinach in 9 liters of wastewater in a plastic container. The amount of biosrbents are varies from 100g to 600g while the contact time is from 1 day to 8 days. After several experiment and analysis of results, it is found that the ferrum removal increased until day 7 before it becomes constant with highest percentage removal of 86.57%. For water spinach amount parameter, ferrum removal is higher with bigger amount of biosorbents with highest percentage removal of 85.32%. As a conclusion, application of water spinach as biosorbent exhibits high potential in wastewater since its capable of removing high percentage of ferrum.