Polysaccharides Based Adsorbent Used for the Assessment and Modeling of Metals Ions in Olifant’s River Catchment, South Africa

The Olifants River in South Africa, is well known to be one of the most polluted rivers in Southern Africa. Water quality issues in the River Catchment are known catchment are known to be primary related to salinity, eutrophication and acid mine drainage. This study aimed to assess the efficiency removal of metal ions in effluent wastewater from a domestic wastewater treatment plant (WWTW), borehole (BH) water contaminated by agriculture and mining activities and acid mine drainage (AMD) effluent from a abandon coal mine. To determine the treatment performance of the adsorbent, the water samples physicochemical parameters; pH, EC, turbidity and COD were measured. The pH and turbidly were within the range while EC and COD values did not fall within the standard discharge limit of industrial effluent by the DWF (1996).The use of shrimp chitosan product cross-linked with glutaraldehyde as an adsorbent was first tested on a certified reference material before applying it to the wastewater, obtained shows exceptional adsorption properties of up to 80% for these elements at concentration above 10 mg/L. However, no reliable results were obtained for samples with less than 1 mg/L. Statistical evaluation of the results at 95% confidence interval using the t-static test shows a standard deviation of ± 7% of the experimental results. Mathematical Modelling employed, results showed AMD effluent presented the power law process, while WWTW effluent, presented a decay process. Finally, for BH we obtained a normal distribution and a mathematical model was employ using the initial condition.