Removal of heavy metals from the water and wastewater is obligatory in order to avoid water contamination. Batch shaking adsorption experiments were held out to assess the carrying into action of the tree leaves in the removal of lead from aqueous solutions. The percentage removal of lead was examined by varying experimental conditions viz., dosage of adsorbent, the pH of the solution and contact time. This paper reported the removal of metal ion Pb2+ from wastewater by using mountain laurel leaves. Mountain laurel leaves were tested at room temperature. The batch adsorption experiments were carried out with 2 g of 4050 mesh leaves in 100 ml synthetic wastewater and pH about 5. The experiment showed that removal rate was 99% for lead(Pb2+) under optimal conditions. The adsorption capacities (Kf) for lead are calculated from the Freundlich adsorption isotherm and from Langmuir adsorption isotherm, the empirical constants (a, b) were found for the mountain laurel leaves respectively. The mountain laurel leaves investigated in this work showed the good application potential for the removal of lead from aqueous solutions. The end of this study is to get inexpensive, highly usable, effective metal ion adsorbents from natural waste as an choice to existing commercial adsorbents.
Adsorption, Isotherms, Lead, Mountain laurel tree leaves
