Black carbon prepared from wasted batteries and its phosphate removal potential

Abstract

Nowadays environmental problems have become one of the most severe problems confronted by human beings, and cannot be avoided wherever you are. Protect the earth as well as our shared living space has to be the consensus of the whole human society. Since the 20th century human beings have been creating unprecedented differentiated materials for the advance of science, technology and societies in general. But at the same time, resources, environmental pollution, ecological damage and other problems are becoming increasingly outstanding, threatening the development and in the end the survival of human species and our planet as we know it. People have realized that we must change the mindset of “challenging the nature” and the traditional development mode “polluting first and treating later,” and try to seek a sustainable development approach in which people, economy, society, environment and resources harmonize with each other. Two of the many problems human society suffers are the surplus of phosphate in our environment and a specific kind of waste, common batteries that are available in abundance all over the world. This study focuses on giving an alternative use to the no longer needed batteries, using them instead of costly synthetic activated carbon, and to absorb phosphate in water. By reducing and recycling the waste of batteries and decreasing the concentration of phosphate in our water we can solve the corresponding environmental and economic problems at the same time.