Adsorption of Methylene Blue Dye from Aqueous solution by Sugarcane Bagasse

Major issues on environmental is caused by the effluents released by industry that contains harmful chemicals such as dyes. All of these chemicals are entering the water bodies without proper treatment will lead to several serious impacts to living organisms. Conventional biological wastewater treatment are no longer suitable to treat this effluents since the colour and chemicals cannot be removed completely from entering the water bodies. Alternative and efficient method in treating wastewater has been discovered by using agricultural waste or by-products as adsorbent for dye removal. One of the most abundant source of agricultural waste in Malaysia is sugarcane bagasse. This study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of sugarcane bagasse (SB) in methylene blue (MB) removal through adsorption process based on four parameters which are initial concentration of MB dye (10-120 mg/L), SB dose (0.5-2.5 g), contact time (40-120 minutes) and solution pH (pH 2-pH 12). The result showed the MB removal of 98% was found to be at 10 mg/L of initial MB concentration, the optimum SB dose was 0.5 g, contact time was at 120 minutes and the optimum pH was at pH 11. The adsorption data from the study showed that Langmuir was the best fitted isotherm model. The findings of this study provided the fundamental scientific evidence of the potential dye removal by using agricultural waste as adsorbent. The data obtained helped to reduce the cost in wastewater treatment.