The present paper reports on the use of modified activated carbon as an environmental friendly adsorbent, obtained from a green vegetable waste, for the removal of copper (II) from wastewaters. The activated carbon was prepared from green vegetable waste by KOH treatment for 24h at 60°C and thereafter evaluated by studying the effects of pH, contact time, dosage and initial concentration and optimized in the batch processing mode. The morphological and chemical changes in activated carbon were fully characterized by SEM, TGA, DSC, FTIR techniques. The Langmuir isotherm, yielded adsorption capacity of 75.0mgg−1 for a pseudo-second-order model. Overall, these results suggest that green vegetable waste derived activated carbon as a low-cost adsorbent for the removal of copper (II) will be useful for future scale-up for the tertiary treatment of wastewater

In the last 5 years, naproxen, ibuprofen and diclofenac have been the subject of investigation in the South African water resources. In this study, their occurrence in river water, sediments and aquatic plants was investigated. The concentrations of compounds detected in river water and sediments varied from 0.59 to 2.3 µg L⁻¹ and 0.2 to 9.2 ng g⁻¹, respectively. The partitioning coefficients (L kg⁻¹) for naproxen, ibuprofen and diclofenac varied from one sampling location to the other in ranges of 3.36–4, 1.3–1.9 and 0.13–0.91, respectively. This indicates that the fate of these pharmaceuticals can be influenced by the surrounding conditions such as climate and presence of other water pollutants as well as differences in physicochemical parameters. In the aquatic plant species (Eichhornia crassipes), the concentrations of target compounds varied in different parts of the plant material (roots, stems and leaves). Naproxen was the most abundant in Eichhornia crassipes, with the maximum concentration of 12.0 ng g⁻¹ found in leaves. In this initial assessment, we found no rational trend for the concentrations detected in various parts of Eichhornia crassipes, however, it is speculated that these pharmaceuticals diffuse from water into the roots of the aquatic plants and get translocated into the stem and leaves. Overall, the occurrence of naproxen, ibuprofen and diclofenac in river water, sediments and Eichhornia crassipes was observed, which is an indication that Eichhornia crassipes has the ability to reduce water pollution through the uptake of pharmaceuticals through plant roots.