HEAVY METAL RETENTION CAPACITY OF DIFFERENT SOILS

Abstract

One of the major problems associated with industriali-zation is to handle industrial wastes. The awareness regarding the adverse effects of waste disposal is increasing day by day, There are different ways by which the industrial waste water can be treated. In the present project a feasibility study pertain-ing to land treatment of synthetic waste water has been taken, An attempt has been made to determine the retention capacities of different soils in batch reactors for copper and zinc sepa-rately. The soils used in this study were collected from three different locations; :namely agriculture field near Majra village, • $olani river bed and University campus near Jawahar Bhawan. Four' soil samples were collected from each location at a depth interval of 30 cm. The soils collected from three above mentioned loca-tions represented three soil types (1) Soil collected from agriculture field is silty clay (ii) Soil collected from Solani river bed is fine sand, and (iii) the soil of University campus is silty sand. For the ,classification of the soil, particle size distri-bution, liquid limit and plastic limit tests were performed. To find out the main characteristics of the soil, pH, organic content, Silica content, Iron as Fe203, total oxides, adsorbed metal exchange capacity were also determined. • iv The results show that agriculture soil (having more organic content and more percentage of fine fractions) retained more copper and zinc in comparison to university campus soil and Solani river bed soil (having less organic content and less per-centage of fine fractions). The Solari river bed soil retained very less. copper and zinc as this soil has least amount of organic content and fine fractions. It is found that for a par-ticular type of soil the metal uptake can be predicted on the basis of organic content. An approach has been indicated to calculate the metal loading from sorption isotherm