Biomass for Green Removal of Dyes

The expanding development of various industries in Malaysia had led to serious pollution to the environment. One of the industries is textiles industries. Disposal of waste water containing residual dyes from textile industries into river is one of the environmental issues nowadays. It is a very dangerous practice as the waste water contain chemicals that can pollute the water in the river. Hence, the waste water need to be treated before being disposed to the river nearby. There are many methods in removing dyes in waste water and can be categorized under three sections which are chemicals, physicals, and biological method. Adsorption method which falls under physical method had been chosen in this project as it is a simple and efficient method. Various agriculture wastes, biomasses had been studied s adsorbent for adsorption method in removing dyes. By researches in recent years, biomass is readily available abundantly and environment friendly. In this project, corn silk was studied as the adsorbent in removal of Janus green dye. The effect of the parameters which are biomass loading, dye concentrations, and solution pH on the dye adsorption using corn silk was investigated. The biomasses also we characterized using four analytical techniques which are Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), and also Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA).