Sustainable environmental technology to reclaim copper from industrial effluent

Electronic manufacturing industries use copper in highest proportion in metals due to its unique properties. But there is a gap in demand and supply of this metal to the industry due to its huge requirement and lack of its proper recycling of copper containing equipments. Also, effluent generated from these industries carries substantial amount of this metal, which get discharged, and loss of metals to the environment. Present paper discusses about valuable copper metal recovery from industrial effluent in powder form using novel process flow-sheet. At start, bio-adsorptiontechnique was used to recover copper from industrial effluent due to its advantages like low cost, feasible method showing faster kinetics. Datura root powder was found to be potential bio-adsorbent for copper recovery from effluent having 997 mg/g adsorption capacity. It follows second-order rate reaction and Freundlich adsorption isotherm with 0.9711 regression coefficient. Further, copper-enriched solution obtained from this technique was subjected to cementation process using scrap iron rods to get copper powder. This can be used to produce value added products using its ingots. This is one of the approaches towards waste to wealth creation having tremendous potential to get commercialized.