Competitive adsorption of substituted phenols by activated carbon developed from the fertilizer waste slurry

The waste slurry generated in fertilizer plants in India has been converted to a cheap carbonaceous adsorbent material. This product is found to be a promising scavenger of some toxic metal ions and phenols in industrial effluents. It has been successfully tried for the removal of a variety of substituted phenols from synthetic as well as live waste from oil refineries. Since a number of organic compounds may be present in industrial waste water, a possible competition that can take place in such systems, has been studied and reported in this paper. The competitive effect on the uptake of various substituted phenols viz 2,4,6-trinitrophenol, 4-nitrophenol, 4-chlorophenol and 1,3-dihydroxybenzene, on the carbonaceous adsorbent developed from fertilizer waste, has been studied using the Langmuir model for bisolute systems and also by the Jain and Snoeyink modified model.