Exploring the potential waste biomass of olive as an additive to layer double hydroxide/poly urethan as an effective and safe agent for the adsorption of drug residues: bioremediation approaches

Abstract

The increasing use of antibiotics worldwide and their presence in wastewater poses a risk to human health and the environment, even in minute amounts, make them potentially new and dangerous pollutants in the ecosystem. Drug resistance and changes in the biological cycle are two of the negative consequences of chemicals. The development of affordable, practical, and recyclable adsorbents is imperative because of the significant threat that the rise in antibiotic residues poses to aquatic and ecological settings. The accumulation of pharmaceutical compounds in aqueous solutions has been lessened by a number of strategies, including adsorption to the surface of agricultural waste. Bioactive substances such as vitamins, carotenoids, and polyphenols are abundant in pomace. They also include minerals, proteins, cellulose, lignin, and pectin. All of these substances exhibit sorption characteristics with respect to pharmaceutical compounds in addition to their many other positive health effects. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Brunauer‒Emmett‒Teller (BET) analysis and particle size were used to thoroughly examine olive pomace (O‒Pom), layered double hydroxide (LDH), poly urethan (PU) and LDH/PU/O‒Pom composites. O-Pom and LDH/PU/O-Pom before and after the adsorption operations of the cefotaxime FTIR were performed and discussed. Next, the effects of several parameters, including pH, dose, concentration, and contact time, on wastewater treatment efficiency were investigated. We studied nonlinear adsorption isotherm models at pH 5 using O-Pom and O-Pom-LDH/PU, which showed maximum adsorption capacities (qmax) of 163.23 mg/g for O-Pom and 250 mg/g for LDH/PU/O-Pom. By identifying the most suitable isotherm, error functions are used to assess the validity of the adsorption mathematical models with experimental data, as precise adsorption equilibrium information is essential for adsorption analysis and design. Additionally, we compared the investigated models with the corrected Akaike's information criterion (AIC) to confirm that more fitting models were used in the isotherm study. The model best fitted according to the AIC calculated for O-Pom was the Freundlich model, and for LDH/PU/O-Pom, the AIC values were 69.23 and 63.91 for O-Pom and LDH/PU/O-Pom, respectively.