A Potential Approach for Converting Rubber Waste into a Low-Cost Polymeric Adsorbent for Removing Methylene Blue from Aqueous Solutions

Abstract

Exploiting waste materials to make cost-effective adsorbents and waste management methods are gaining more attention. In the current study, rubber wastes derived from dipping tank coagulum (DTC) in the glove manufacturing industry were converted into a novel polymeric-adsorbent via a simple sulfonation reaction with concentrated sulphuric acid and was used for the adsorption of methylene blue (MB) dye from aqueous solutions commonly found in contaminated waters. FT-IR, EDX, FESEM, and BET techniques were used to characterize the rubber waste before and after modification. The highest MB removal efficiency of 99.03% was achieved in the condition of initial concentration, adsorbent dosage, pH, contact time, and temperature were 15 mg/L, 30 mg, pH 7, 300 min, and 25 °C, respectively. The adsorption of MB was analyzed using experimental data fitted in a monolayer isotherms model with a maximum adsorption capacity of 119 mg/g. The kinetic model was revealed to agree with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Furthermore, SRW retained 90.45% of the removal percentage after four cycles of the repeated adsorption-desorption process. Conclusively, these findings suggest that rubber waste could be a suitable low-cost adsorbent to remove organic dyes from polluted water.

Molecularly Imprinted Polymer-Based Nanoporous Carbon Nanocomposite for Effective Adsorption of Hg(II) Ions from Aqueous Suspensions

“…The universal gas constant, R, was used to calculate vital thermodynamic parameters such as enthalpy ∆H, entropy ∆S, and Gibbs free energies ∆G. These findings of the studies were calculated using the following Equations ( 5) and ( 6) [37].…”

“…In general, the Freundlich model is more appropriate for illustrating multi-layer adsorption processes on heterogeneous surface adsorbents than the Langmuir isotherm [35]. The following Equations ( 7) and ( 8) denote the linear forms of Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms [37].…”