Efficient and Sustainable Phosphate Removal from Water by Small-sized Al(OH) Nanocrystals Confined in Discarded Artemia Cyst-shell: Ultrahigh Sorption Capacity and Rapid Sequestration

We reported a new strategy for efficient phosphate removal from wastewaters, it relies on the discarded Artemia Cyst-shell in-situ growth of Al(OH) nanocluster, the charged amino-acids components of skeleton make available for the small size of Al(OH) formation (< 10 nm) with high activity, and the three-dimensional porous structure of discarded matrix provides fast kinetics and efficient Al(OH) nanoparticles utilization. These hybrid adsorbents exhibit ultrahigh capacity (850.5 mg/g) and fast kinetics (~2 min) by recent ten-years (2011-2020) survey, the superior selectivity against various foreign ions, with a distribution coefficient (K) as high as 4820 mL/g, the porous structure and fast kinetics also accelerate the phosphate accessibility, yielding a satisfactory capacity of ~3000 L/kg sorbent (Artemia CS-Al) for the application, even varying at high feeding-speeds. The saturated adsorbent can be readily regenerated and reused without decrease in performance, this technology is promising for mitigating the contamination problem of excess phosphate worldwide.