Environmental pollution by heavy metal ions causes serious socio-environmental problems and has a detrimental impact on public health and the population surroundings. Heavy metals like zinc, lead, nickel, cadmium, copper, mercury, and also chromium are most contaminant which pollutes the water due to their large amounts source contaminated in wastewater which released from the industrial activity.
Conventional treatment methods were generated to reduce of heavy metals contents were used like chemical precipitation, reverse osmosis, ion exchange, phytoremediation, electro-chemicals, and ultra-filtration [1-5]. Then, the method by adsorption with use biomaterial or biosorption become new attractive method to reduce heavy metal content in liquid waste because their simple and cheap in preparation and easy in application.
Some of biosorbent were used as heavy metal removal like bio-sorbent from alga [6], peels of banana [7] and water hyacinth [8]. Bio-sorption has a potential process in heavy metals removal contaminants include the mcro level of contaminant. The Biosorption mechanism formed as complex processes which comprise the binding between adsorbate material and the bio-sorbent. Many natural ingredients were potential as biosorbents because of the binding of metal ions by chemical sorption (ion exchange) binding, complexation, reduction, chelation, and precipitation or physical sorption (electrostatic interaction or van der Waals forces) [9,10]. Bio-sorbents is contain of functional (chemicals) groups like amide, amine, carbonyl, carboxyl, sulfonate, imidazole, imine, phenolic, and phosphate groups that can attract metal ions [11-15].
Biosorbents are made from all natural materials that contain carbon, both organic carbon and inorganic carbon which has a porous structure, like jatropha curcas leaves (Jatropha curcas L.). The chemical as organic content of jatropha leaves is carbohydrate (45.4 %), fat (3.2 %), protein (28.0 %), ash (23.4 %) [16, 17]. Bio-sorbent from jatropha leaves also have studied to heavy metal ion removal like Cr, Cu and Zn, but no report of jatropha leaves as bio-sorbent to adsorb Pb and Cd ion in contaminant water [18,19]. Jatropha leaves have relatively large porous structure and contain some of organics group which induce as a funtion of biosorbent for the development of water purification contaminated with Pb2+ and Cd2+ [5-8].
The number of liquid wastes that simultaneously contain both of Pb and Cd ions, and the varying amounts of them which are more absorbed by using some bio-sorbents, so in this study we developed to make adsorbents with selective adsorption properties between Pb2+ and Cd2+ ions by Jatropha curcas L. leaves as specific bio-sorbent.
In this study we prepared Jatropha curcas L. leaves as biosorbent to adsorb Pb and Cd ions in water solution. Because the presence of liquid waste that simultaneously contains both Pb2+ and Cd2+, and the varying amounts of Pb2+ and Cd2+ ions which absorbed by using some bio-sorbents, it is necessary to develop adsorption properties with selective between metal Pb2+ and Cd2+ in mixture system.