Tea waste based natural adsorbent for toxic pollutant removal from waste samples

Alkali treated tea waste (ATTW) was investigated as a novel alternative cost-effective natural adsorbent to decontaminate the pollutant of chromium (Cr(VI)) in the polluted water with the variation of equilibration time, solution pH, initial Cr(VI) concentration, adsorbent dosage, and temperature with a view to ensuring a safe disposal as well as sustainable management of the discarded bulk quantities of industrial tea leaves wastes. The adsorbent characteristic was confirmed the significant amount of Cr(VI) accumulation onto ATTW surfaces. The adsorption processes were satisfactorily described by pseudo-first order (PFO), pseudo-second order (PSO) and intra-particles diffusion models (IDM) where the PSO model evidently shows a better fitting with the regression coefficient (R2 = 0.994). Exploration of Langmuir, Freundlich, Flory-Huggins, and Temkin isotherm models…