“…The experiments were conducted in two separated stages at two different times (with stage one from 1 to 9 min, and stage two commencing after 10 min), and the small (<5%) difference in adsorption/desorption was attributed to the two-stage separation of the experiments. The adsorption reactions were faster than adsorption of SCN À onto various materials (such as ZnCl 2 -activated carbon, Fe(III)/Cr(III) hydroxide, zeolite and hydrotalcite) and adsorption of anions ( ) onto ferrihydrite, for which the completion times ranged from 20 min to a few hours (Hansen et al, 1994;Raven et al, 1998;Namasivayam and Sangeetha, 2005;Li et al, 2006Li et al, , 2008Namasivayam and Prathap, 2006;Namasivayam and Sureshkumar, 2007;Aguirre et al, 2010;Wu et al, 2011;Fukushi et al, 2013;Mallet et al, 2013;Xie et al, 2013;Kim et al, 2014). Although adsorption kinetics are strongly influenced by the solid/liquid ratio and initial concentration of SCN À (Namasivayam and Sureshkumar, 2007;Li et al, 2008;Wu et al, 2011), at the same initial concentration of SCN À (0.86 mM or 50 mg L À1 ) and solid/liquid ratio (2 g L À1 ), adsorption of SCN À on to ferrihydrite was still the fastest.…”