Biosorption for Wastewater Treatment and Post-sorption Utilization of Treated Wastewater and Spent Biosorbent

Biosorption is one of the potent strategies for pollutant removal from aqueous solutions employing living or non-living biological materials. The mass transfer results in accumulating and concentrating the adsorbate in/on the biomass adsorbent (biosorbent), mostly through complexation and chelation. Generally, biosorbents such as bacteria, fungi, algae, chitin, and chitosan, plant biomass from agricultural and horticultural activities have been widely explored for the pollutant removal efficacy and for their comparative performance with activated carbon, zeolite, silicates and ion-exchange materials. Principally, biosorption is solely a mass transfer method, in which degradation or destruction of the pollutant does not happen. Only interphase transfer of mass (pollutant) and leaching of chemicals from biosorbent take place during the process which ultimately provides treated wastewater and pollutant loaded post-sorbent material. Management of post-sorption products is relatively less explored domain and a few options i.e., recovery of adsorbates by desorption/elution, land fill, storage, incineration, animal feed additive, crop irrigation (treated water) etc., have been reported. With this backdrop, the present chapter aims to provide a comprehensive account on the following aspects related to biosorption process: