Abstract:
While recycled organic materials such as compost have conventionally been used
in soil improvement they also have a capability to adsorb heavy metals. This adsorption
capacity is an important property when compost is used for environmental applications. In
infiltration systems sand is typically used as a filtration material. However compost based
filtration media can be combined with sand to improve its performance. The tests showed
compost material has the highest metal removal efficiency but leached larger amount of
dissolved organic carbon (DOC), whereas Enviro-media also had high levels of metal
removal but only low levels of DOC was leached compared with compost. Sand adsorbs low
levels of DOC and metals. The relative binding of these metals to materials are mostly found
to be in the order of Cu>Zn. The studies established that a solid to liquid ratio at 1110 and a
shaking for 24 hours was an appropriate reaction time for batch adsorption test of recycled
organic materials. These data show the potential use of these materials in remediation work,
or as a substitute to natural materials.
