Wastewater treatment of palm oil mill effluent by activated carbon from palm oil empty fruit bunch

Activated carbon is one of the most effective, versatile and useful adsorbents for the removal of pollutants from polluted gas and liquid streams because of their large adsorption capacities, extremely high surface areas and well developed porous structures, fast adsorption kinetics and good mechanical properties. In this study, activated carbon produced from oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) was used to remove oil in the palm oil mill effluent. OPEFB agriculture waste was chosen to see its ability in removing oil in wastewater. The empty fruit bunch (EFB) was carbonized in furnace (600 °C), activated with KOH and carbonized again in furnace (800°C). The experiments were performed by varying the contact time with initial concentration of oil and different flow rate as the parameter of adsorption analysis. The study was conducted by the column adsorption method and followed by the gravimetric method to identify the oil removal from wastewater. The activated carbon shows the highest percentage removal for the initial wastewater concentration (100%) after 24 hours contact time was 99.92%. For the flow rate, 1 mL/min show the highest percentage removal of 99.59% compared to 3 mL/min and 5 mL/min. The activated carbon was characterized by means of Fourier transform infrared spectrometry. The results of the present study indicate that the activated carbon prepared from the empty fruit bunch is a promising candidate as a low-cost bio-adsorbent for the removal of oil from palm oil mill effluent.