Sustainable environmental technology to reclaim copper from industrial effluent

Abstract

Electronic manufacturing industries use copper in highest proportion in metals due to its uniqueproperties. But there is a gap in demand and supply of this metal to the industry due to its hugerequirement and lack of its proper recycling of copper containing equipments. Also, effluentgenerated from these industries carries substantial amount of this metal, which get discharged,and loss of metals to the environment. Present paper discusses about valuable copper metalrecovery from industrial effluent in powder form using novel process flow-sheet. At start, bio-adsorptiontechnique was used to recover copper from industrial effluent due to its advantages likelow cost, feasible method showing faster kinetics. Datura root powder was found to be potentialbio-adsorbent for copper recovery from effluent having 997 mg/g adsorption capacity. Itfollows second-order rate reaction and Freundlich adsorption isotherm with 0.9711 regressioncoefficient. Further, copper-enriched solution obtained from this technique was subjected tocementation process using scrap iron rods to get copper powder. This can be used to producevalue added products using its ingots. This is one of the approaches towards waste to wealthcreation having tremendous potential to get commercialized.