Treatment of Wastewater with High-Surface-Area Activated Carbon Prepared from Waste Tobacco by Enzyme Activation

This is the first report of a simple method to prepare high-surface-area activated carbon derived from waste tobacco by enzyme activation. The synthesized activated carbon was characterized by several techniques such as IR and BET, and the adsorption behaviours of organic pollutants and hazardous metal salts in the wastewater were analyzed under different operating conditions. The experimental results showed that the BET surface area of the activated carbons prepared reached 1600.1 m(2) g(-1) and the average aperture was 2.66 nm, much higher than the value for commercially available activated carbon. The adsorption rates on methylene blue, methyl orange and phenol from aqueous solution were 99.86, 99.28 and 90.38 %, respectively in 1 h. It is a potential treatment agent for wastewater or for use in purification and also will develop the utility of tobacco to treat waste-water with wastes.