The poisoning of water bodies with heavy metals (HMs) hasraised due to urbanization, industry, and natural earth processes. Different clean-up strategies, particularly traditional techniques, have been used to sequester heavy metals.
However, the majority of these methods have limited efficacy for effective heavy metal removal, rigorous management, and frequent monitoring requirements, making them expensive for large-scale operations. Algae provide a different, environmentally responsible, and sustainable method for remediating and removing heavy metals.
Are algae used to remove heavy metals from wastewater?
Algal biomass has a metal-accumulation capability that is on par with or even somewhat greater than, that of chemical sorbents. The conventional physicochemical methods of metal removal and recovery, from wastewaters may therefore be replaced by algal biomass as an economically viable and effective alternative.
However, it should be utilized for the adsorption of metal ions on the dead biomass and cover metal ion binding, on extracellular as well as intracellular ligands.
Accumulation of metals by algae
Two processes are involved in the build-up of heavy metals in algae:
· A rapid initial uptake followed by a considerably slower uptake.
Metal ions adsorb onto the cell surface during passive absorption in a brief period of time (a few seconds or minutes), and the process is unrelated to metabolism.
Metal ions are transported over the cell membrane and into the cytoplasm as a result of active absorption, which depends on metabolism. Due to a metal induced increase in the cell membrane's permeability, the transport of metal ions may occasionally also take place by passive diffusion.
How is the number of metals accumulated by algae related with the concentration of metals in water?
Depending on the concentration of the metals in the environment outside, algae can acquire large levels of the metal. Varying algae species have very different heavy metal concentration factors, but they all rise as the metal content in the waterfalls.
Since, the concentration of metals in water and the amount of metal accumulated by algae are connected, it may be possible to use the metal content of native algae for bio-monitoring of metal pollution in water bodies.
Additionally, the ability of algae to naturally accumulate metals could be exploited to recover precious metals, such as gold and silver from wastewaters, and lessen the weight of hazardous metal load.
The concentration of algae to remove heavy metals
Algae can sometimes even be more effective than other sorbents at removing metals. The typical ion exchangers and resins have very poor metal removal effectiveness, at or below 10 mg/l metal concentration in the solution.
However, algae may almost entirely eliminate metal ions from liquids, containing little to no metal.
Factors affecting metal absorption by Algae
Biosorp?tion of heavy metals by algae may be affected by several factors, including:
1) concentration of metal,
2) biomass,
3) pH,
4) temperature,
5) presence of competing ions, and
6) the metabolic stage of the organism.
Conclusion
The use of biological processes for the treatment of wastewaters that are metal-enriched, can get around some of the drawbacks of physical and chemical treatments, and offer a way to get metals out of the system at a reasonable price.
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the use of various low-cost biomass types for adsorbing, and eliminating heavy metals from wastewater.
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