The decrease in nitrate content of polluted waters by using waste wood as adsorbent material

Abstract

Large amounts of waste wood obtained from logging and wood processing have found various uses in the furniture industry, agriculture, entering into various compost recipes with applications in restoring soil's fertility or as absorbent material in numerous technologies, given the porous structure and composition of such materials. In the present study, we tested the capacity of grinded sawdust, simple and activated in acidic and alkaline solutions, to retain nitrates from aqueous solutions of different concentrations. Although all the variants have given very good results, sawdust activated in a solution of hydrochloric acid registered the retention of nitrate in an amount of 99.99% at concentrations up to 250 mg / l and 99.95% for the ones up to 400 mg / l. The method may be also considered for large scale applications due to the high adsorption speed