ABSTRACT
Rapid industrialisation has led to an increase of the amount of heavy metals discharged into the environment. Generally speaking, removal of heavy metals from wastewater is usually achieved by physico-chemical processes, including chemical precipitation, ion exchange, electrochemical treatment, membrane technologies and adsorption to name a few (Kapoor and Viraraghavan 1995; Matheickal and Yu 1996, 1997, 1999; Ahluwalia and Goyal 2007). Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages. Chemical precipitation and electrochemical treatments are not always effective, especially when metal ion concentration in an aqueous solution is lower than 50 mg/L (Das et al. 2008). Moreover, such treatments produce large amounts of sludge to be treated with great difculties. Ion exchange and membrane technologies are complex and expensive (Alluri et al. 2007; Farooq et al. 2010).
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