Highly efficient removal of organic dyes and heavy metal cation from wastewater by polyphenolate porous coordination polymer

Seeking efficient, reusable, and low-budget adsorbent materials for the removal of industrial effluent is of great interest for the community of environmental chemistry. In this work, a mesoporous phenolic resin-type polymer was successfully synthesized by one-step solvothermal synthesis starting from two relatively cheap polymer monomers (i.e., phloroglucinol and 4,4 '-Biphenyldicarboxaldehyde), and it exhibited excellent adsorption capacity toward both methylene blue (728.63 mg/g) and Pb (II) (176.08 mg/g) at 308 K. Based on a variety of characterizations on this material and a systematic study on the effect of various working conditions (including concentration, temperature, pH value, and ionic strength), we conclude that the adsorption for methylene blue and Pb(II) on phenolic resin-type polymer was consistent with pseudo-second-order kinetic equation (R-2 > 0.98) and Langmuir model (R-2 > 0.97); adsorptions were thermodynamically endothermic and occurred spontaneously; adsorptions were driven by the electrostatic interaction between phenolic resin-type polymer and Methylene blue or Pb (II). Our research demonstrated the potential application of phenolic resin-type polymer in the elimination of two different types of pollutants from wastewater.