Efficient Removal of Glyphosate from Aqueous Solution by Cerium Dioxide Loaded Biochar

Abstract

Glyphosate,which is one of the most widely used organophosphorus herbicides, poses athreat to the surrounding water environment. Traditional adsorbents weredepicted to have poor capacities to eliminate it. CeO₂ embraces the potentialto adsorb glyphosate efficiently. However, suitable carbonaceous composites were necessary to beemployed as its support. In this paper, water hyacinth was used as theprecursor to prepare CeO₂-loadedbiochar (CeO₂/WHBC),which was employed to remove glyphosate from the aqueous solution viaadsorption. The results showed that CeO₂/WHBC-3 illustrated the best adsorptionperformance for glyphosate with the capacity of 126.3 mg·g, which was preparedwith per mmol CeO₂ loaded of 0.2 g WHCB. Static adsorption experimentsdemonstrated that glyphosate adsorption at different solution pH valuesfollowed the Langmuir isotherm model and quasi-second order kinetic model,indicating that the adsorption was monolayer adsorption and that the adsorbent'ssurface active sites primarily controlled the rate. Coexisting ion interferenceexperiments showed that common cations (K⁺, Na⁺, Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺) and anions (Cl^-, NO₃^-, SO₄^2-) both promotedglyphosate adsorption on the CeO₂/WHBC-3 surface. Moreover, the prepared sorbent maintaineda high adsorption capacity after five adsorption-desorption cycles. Dynamicadsorption experiments showed that the CeO₂/WHBC-3 packed column could efficientlyremove glyphosate from aqueous solutions, even at high concentrations and fastflow rates. Zeta potentials and XPS analysis revealed that the adsorptionmechanism of CeO₂/WHBC-3for glyphosate is mainly through electrostatic adsorption and metalcomplexation.

Keywords

Waterhyacinth / Biochar / Glyphosate / Adsorption / CeO₂

Acknowledgment

The authors express gratitude to the Joint Fund of National Natural Science Foundation (U24A2094), Hubei Natural Science Foundation Innovation and Development Joint Fund (2024AFD138), Hubei Three Gorges Laboratory Open Fund (SK240009) and Graduate Education Teaching Reform project of Wuhan Institute of Technology (NO. 2023JYXM09).for providing financial support for this study.

Author Contributions

B.Z.: Writing-original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Datacuration, Conceptualization. R.W.: Validation, Investigation. J.W.: Writing—review& editing, Formal analysis, Data curation. J.Y.: Writing—review & editing. Project administration, Funding acquisition. X.L.: MethodologyFormal analysis. L.G.: Resources. Y.C.: Resources. Q.Z.: Resources. C.X.: Resources. R.C.: SupervisionResources, Project administration.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data will be made available on request.

Funding

The work is funded by Joint Fund of National Natural Science Foundation (U24A2094), Hubei Natural Science Foundation Innovation and Development Joint Fund (2024AFD138), Hubei Three Gorges Laboratory Open Fund (SK240009) and Graduate Education Teaching Reform project of Wuhan Institute of Technology (NO. 2023JYXM09).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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