Hydrothermal carbonization of agro-waste for phosphate and nitrate removal from water environment

Worldwide, nitrate and phosphate pollution of freshwater resources is seen as a serious issue. The most pervasive pollution in an aquatic environment, eutrophication, which harms the ecology, and serious hazards to human health are all brought on by the overwhelming release of phosphate and nitrate. As a result, the elimination and restoration of such phosphate and nitrate are regarded as one of the solutions to limit the algae blooms of aquatic environment by applying a variety of techniques. Adsorption is a simple, cost-effective, green, and all-purpose technique used to clean up nitrate and phosphate from liquid waste. Utilizing greener hydrothermal carbonization technique, alkaline impregnation, and neutral atmosphere activation, we developed a unique method for producing porous carbon sphere from bagasse in this article. The produced carbon sphere demonstrates a sizable ability to extract contaminants from aqueous solutions. Outcomes of the experiments demonstrate that the optimum condition was reached in 60 min, and the ideal pH and carbon sphere dosage were discovered to be 7 and 1.4 g/L, correspondingly. The nitrate and phosphate sorption kinetics are suited by the pseudo-first-order equation with coefficient of correlation values of 0.99 and 0.98, correspondingly. Additionally, isotherm research demonstrates that Freundlich isotherms with R2 value as 0.9978 for nitrate adsorption and 0.9975 for phosphate adsorption provided a good model for these adsorption studies.