Özet:

Water resources are threatened by a lot of pollutants such as heavy metals. Copper, a heavy metal, is quite toxic at high concentrations similar to the other heavy metals. These metals can also accumulate fatty tissues of livings. Due to these reasons heavy metals should be removed from wastewaters before being discharged. There are many methods to remove heavy metals such as chemical precipitation, ion exchange, membrane technologies, etc. Adsorption is an alternative method which is cheap, easy to apply and effective. Various adsorbents including biopolymers are used efficiently for heavy metal removal. Alginate is one of them composed of mannuronic and guluronic acid monomers. Alginate can form beads by adding mostly calcium which were used for heavy metal removal. Recent studies were particularly focused on improvement of these beads by adding some materials capable of capturing heavy metals such as clay, bentonite, activated carbon, etc. In this study, a natural zeolite, clinoptilolite was used to increase copper removal capacity of alginate beads. For copper removal, series of adsorption experiments were performed under constant temperature and mixing rate. Alginate-clinoptilolite beads were found to be more effective (almost 20 % of higher copper removal) compared to alginate beads alone. Adsorption of copper was equilibrated after about 8 hours of incubation and the highest copper reduction was observed as 87 mg Cu2+/g alginate-clinoptilolite beads at initial Cu2+ concentration of 100 mg/L.

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