Competitive removal of heavy metals from spiked hospital wastewater on acidic and chelating dehydrated carbons

Date palm leaflets were carbonised using sulphuric acid dehydration, producing acidic dehydrated carbon (DC) that was converted to chelating dehydrated carbon (CDC) using ethylene diamine functionalisation. Both carbons were surface characterised and tested for competitive removal of Cd²⁺, Cu²⁺, Co²⁺, Ni²⁺ and Zn²⁺ from metal mixtures in hospital wastewater (HWW) and deionised water (DW). Sorption kinetics data follow pseudo-second-order model. Equilibrium sorption data follow the Langmuir model with better performance for CDC than DC. Sorption of metals from metal mixture from DW is clearly higher than from HWW because of the high content of organic moieties in HWW.