Potential of agricultural waste materials: (Ananas comosus) peels as biosorbent for heavy metals removal

Since the industrial world is growing, the issue of environmental pollution has become more severe due to the disposal of heavy metals discharged by industrial factories into the river. Conventional method to remove heavy metals are expensive and not environmentally friendly. This study tries to find out the potential of biomaterial (Ananas comosus) as biosorbent for heavy metals removal. Pineapple peels seem to be useless and turned out to be agricultural waste. Therefore, the aim of this research is to reveal the use of pineapple peels as adsorbent for the removal of heavy metals (Cd, Cr and Pb) in standard metals solution. In this study, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) was used to identify the functional group contain in pineapple peels. The effect of various parameters such as adsorbent dosage, contact time and pH were studied. The result show the best value adsorbent dosage, contact time and pH for Cd, Cr and Pb are similar which is at 12 g (54.11%, 62.98% and 78.51% respectively), 90 minutes (32.67% for Cd and 89.99% Pb) and pH 9 (98.44%, 88.35% and 93.65%) respectively. In addition, Langmuir adsorption isotherm model gave a better result for all effect of adsorbent dosage, contact time and pH for Cd, Cr and Pb with the maximum adsorption capacity 0.002, 0.017 and 0.038 mg/g respectively.