Utilization of Waste Materials for the Treatment of Waste Water Contaminated with Sulphamethoxazole.

The activities were carried out to develop potential adsorbents from waste material and employ them for the removal of hazardous antibacterial, Sulphamethoxazole from the wastewater by adsorption technique. The selection of this method was done because of its economic viability. The method has the potency of eradicating the perilous chemicals which make their appearance in water and directly or indirectly into the whole biological system, through the ejection of effluents by the industries in flowing water. The adsorption technique was used to impound the precarious antibiotics from wastewater using Deoiled Soya an agricultural waste and Water Hyacinth a prolific colonizer. The adsorption capacity of these adsorbents was further enhanced by treating them with sodium hydroxide solution and it was seen that the adsorption capacity increases by 10% to 25%. Hence a comparative account of the adsorption studies of all the four adsorbents i.e. Deoiled Soya, Alkali treated Deoiled Soya, Water Hyacinth and Alkali treated Water Hyacinth has been discussed in this paper. Different isotherms like Freundlich, Langmuir and Dubinin Radushkevich were also deduced from the adsorption data. Isotherm studies were in turn used in estimating the thermodynamic parameters. Deoiled Soya (DOS) showed sorption capacity of 0.0007 mol g(-1) while Alkali treated Deoiled Soya (ADOS) exhibited 0.0011 mol g(-1) of sorption capacity which reveals that the adsorption is higher in case of alkali treated adsorbent. The mean sorption energy (E) was obtained between 9 to 12 kJ/mol which shows that the reaction proceeds by ion exchange reaction. Various kinetic studies like order of reaction, mass transfer studies, mechanism of diffusion were also performed for the ongoing processes. The mass transfer coefficient obtained for alkali treated moieties was higher than the parent moieties. The breakthrough curves plotted from the column studies show percentage saturation of 90% to 98%. Moreover the adsorbed antibacterial were desorbed and regenerated in its original form. Thus, the method was able to remove the drugs from water but simultaneously could regenerate these expensive drugs.