Valorisation of Agricultural Waste into a Low-Cost Adsorbent: Perspective of Reutilization

Agricultural wastes are one of the most abundant and renewable sources of biomass on the planet majorly composed of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, but due to a lack of commercial technology, they remain mostly untapped. Disposal of agricultural waste through conventional approaches causes severe environmental and health impacts on living and non-living beings that acquired more attention and makes a path for evolution of viable methods or techniques for the wise usage of agricultural waste to manage the enormous amounts of waste produced sustainably, prevent environmental harm, and reflect a closed-loop economy that transforms waste into a useful significant value-added product. Adsorption is one of the potential and most suitable approaches for managing and sequestering pollutants because of its simplest operational procedure, economic viability, and great flexibility. Agricultural waste can be used as a low-cost adsorbent owing to its biochemical compositions such as cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin that contribute to adsorbent’s key properties such as porous structures and surface functional groups availability. This chapter summarizes the potential properties of agricultural wastes and valorisation approaches for reutilization of wastes into different value-added products, more specifically as adsorbents. The chapter also emphasizes physicochemical adsorption mechanisms for diverse hazardous pollutants such as dyes, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disruptors using different agricultural waste-derived adsorbents. The current status and trends in agricultural wastes valorisation, pollutants removal through adsorption and challenges and difficulties in adsorption of toxic pollutants are also discussed elaborately.