Adsorption of anionic surfactant in graphite oxide: A study for treatment of laundry wastewater

Laundry wastewater, when discharged directly into water bodies, is an environmental problem due to the high load of pollutants it contains particularly surfactant compounds that are difficult to treat by conventional processes. In this work, we evaluated the behavior of graphite oxide (GO) synthesized by the Hummer method for adsorption retention of such surfactant compounds. The adsorbent material used was graphite oxide prepared with recycled graphite from lithium batteries. The applicability of graphite oxide in the adsorption of anionic surfactant was evaluated by adsorption kinetics and physicochemical characterization, before and after adsorption, using sensitive techniques such as XRD, SEM, AFM, Raman spectroscopy and MIR-FTIR. The results showed that the adsorption kinetics well represented by the pseudo-second-order model indicating chemical interactions between surfactants and graphite oxide, with q(e,calc) (238.09 mg g(-1)) close to q(e,exp) (227.96 mg g(-1)), suggesting that pre-filtering decreases competition for adsorption sites. This result is promising for the treatment of anionic surfactants, which are the main pollutants in laundry wastewater.