Abstract
One of the greatest environmental challenges in the world is the ecological emissions of heavy metals introduced by different anthropogenic activities such as mining, energy and fuel manufacturing industries, electric sports, wastewater sludge handling and agriculture. This is undoubtedly due to increasing industrialization, growing population and total environmental health indifference. Numerous techniques including adsorption can be applied to extract and separate heavy metals. Extensive research has been ongoing to design appropriate adsorbents that will effectively and efficiently remove heavy metals from wastewater. In this study, fruit and vegetable wastes were used to prepared carbon nanomaterials which were then coated with metal oxides resulting in the formation of nanocomposite materials used for the extraction of selected heavy metals from aqueous solution. These novel nanocomposites were applied not only for heavy metal adsorption but to tackle as well the issue of secondary environmental pollution by reusing the metal loaded adsorbent in latent fingerprint applications...
Ph.D. (Chemical Science)