TORREFIED MEDICAL COTTON WASTE FOR INDUSTRIAL LIQUID WASTE CLEANING

Cotton is a material with a wide range of use and a great annual production which explains why huge amounts of cotton waste and medical cotton waste exist. These amounts can be treated and become a considerable volume of recycled biomass, instead of treated as common waste and end up in the land-field. Torrefaction was used in order to sterilize cotton waste and pretreat it in order to be used as recycled biomass. Dyes are an important category of pollutants of valuable water resource. Dye removal occurs via several treatment technologies and among them adsorption, which consists one of the most common treatment methods. The growing demand for efficient and low-cost treatment methods as well as the importance of adsorption has brought attention to low-cost adsorbents. The purpose of this study is to discover whether torrefied cotton is an efficient material regarding basic dyes removal like Methylene Blue (MB) from substitute wastewater. More specifically we used a blast furnace in order to achieve torrefaction. The conditions applied were a non-isothermal heating up to 340 degrees C for 20-50 minutes. The effect of torrefaction pretreatment conditions, i.e., reaction time and temperature on MB adsorption, was investigated using UV-visible spectrophotometry. The applicability of various adsorption kinetic models was studied herein.