Treatment of oily waste by using activated carbon from agriculture waste

The increasing number of vehicles in Malaysia contributes to the development of automobile workshop that produces huge amount of waste. This waste is not treated and contains high level of suspended total solids. For example oil, grease, dyestuff, chromium, phosphate in washing products and colouring, as well as heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, barium and others potential metals. All these hazardous wastes directly pollute the environment especially the groundwater and harm the ecosystem. In order to minimize and reduce the impact to the environment, treatments should be done in which permeable reactive barrier (PRB) technology is applied to treat the waste. Activated carbon is one of the PRB utilised. It is compromised material for treatments of waste and there are varieties of sources to produce activated carbon. Malaysia as an active agricultural country, massive amount of various agriculture wastes can be turned into activated carbon. They are two methods used to produce activated carbon, namely furnace heat processing and microwave processing. The usage of furnace and microwave instruments can produce different quality of activated carbon due to different mechanism involved.