Efficacy Of Aloe Vera Powder in Bioremediation of Heavy Metals from Waste Water

Abstract

Water is important component of life but on earth, major part of water is wasted without human consumption. The resulting scarce water conditions along with continuous pollution of existing fresh water bodies are the serious challenges in current times. Addition of Heavy metals in water results in water toxicity and pollution. The presence of heavy metals in wastewater causes toxic effects on living organisms. The removal of metals from waste water can be removed by the process of bio sorption that results in the metals absorption on the biological surfaces. Objective: Keeping in consideration, present study was aimed for the removal of heavy metals from wastewater by using aloe vera leaf powder as adsorbent. Methods: Adsorption experiments of different metals in waste water were done using different percentages of Aloe Vera powder and results were recorded in terms of change in pH of solutions. Results: Alovera present at low percentages in mixture showed less adsorption. Similarly, adsorption was found to be higher with higher alovera percentage showing decrease in pH of the mixture. Atomic absorption spectrophotometric determination was done for metal Zn while analysis of Na was done using flame photometric technique for adsorption of metals in waste water. Results showed that 1.4 % alovera powder has used the metal absorbent efficiency was 9.495 %. However, with addition of 4 % alovera powder, percentage efficiency was increased to 10.237 % showing positive effect of alovera powder on metal extraction. Conclusion: By flame photometry of sodium result showed that extraction efficiency was 500 % using aloe vera powder. Aloe vera plant was proved to be an excellent biomaterial for accumulating metal ions from wastewater due to its outstanding uptake capacity.