“…Details on the optimization of the synthesis conditions have been discussed in previous investigations (Carvalho et al, 2004(Carvalho et al, , 2006Mestre et al, 2007;Parra et al, 2004Parra et al, , 2006 and remain out of the scope of this paper, which is devoted to the potential application of these wastederived adsorbents for the removal of pharmaceuticals from aqueous phase. Nevertheless for data interpretation purposes, the main textural parameters of the synthesized carbons are reported in Table 1. The N 2 adsorption isotherms (not shown) of the carbons obtained from activation of cork and PET residues (samples CAC and P, respectively) belong to type I in the BDDT classification (Brunauer et al, 1940), with a sharp knee at low relative pressures, indicating that the microporosity of these samples is mainly composed of pores of small diameter. A further analysis of the PSD combining the information of N 2 and CO 2 adsorption isotherms indicated that the pore volume determined by CO 2 data in CAC carbon is larger than the corresponding volume of micropores "seen" by N 2 , confirming that the narrow microporosity (ultramicropores, pore widths < 0.7 nm) represents an important contribution for the overall porosity of this carbon.…”