Call for papers: Special issue on: “Metal Ions Removal From Liquid Effluents”

International Journal of Environment and Waste Management (IJEWM)

Call for papers: Special issue on: “Metal Ions Removal From Liquid Effluents”

Guest Editor: Prof. K. A. Matis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Fresh water is usually thought of being abundant and easily accessible; in reality, it seems that less and less water is available for the needs of an increasing world population, and a considerable disparity exists between the amounts of water available for the developed world and for the developing or under-developed countries. In addition to the potential shortage of water, another severe problem is the pollution of available fresh water streams (sources, resources) by various undesirable substances some of which, e.g. the heavy metal ions, are toxic for humans through the food-chain pyramid.

In some cases, these substances are unfortunately natural constituents and pollution of these streams seems to have happened accidentally but in most, the presence of metal ions is the result of a certain human activity, industrial, agricultural or household; toxicity depends on many chemical and physical parameters of the metals solution including their aqueous speciation. Several metals as copper, zinc, cobalt, however, in trace quantities are essential for living organisms. Further, as new economy activities are in fact surprisingly dependent on traditional raw materials (i.e. a PC typically contains ~30 mineral ingredients), metals recovery except separation is of great significance.

National and international legislation (i.e. the principle of sustainable development in EU, etc.) enforces the treatment of these streams in order to remove the noxious components and different techniques have been developed to achieve this. The conventional processes to treat this kind of water (namely precipitation, precipitation/reduction, ion exchange/sorption bed filtration, the membrane processes and so on) have often disadvantages, such as the following and for this reason, mainly, research is being carried out; high use of treatment chemicals, large quantities of sludge produced, inadequate selectivity, slow kinetics, low capacity, fouling and scaling problems, cost-ineffectiveness.

There is also a trend to apply combined and hybrid treatment for this case: examples presented in the literature in recent years include: membrane bioreactors, distillation-reverse osmosis, distillation-membrane pervaporation, membrane-ozonation systems.

Papers discussing current research in these and related areas are welcome.

For more information, subject coverage, notes for intending authors, submission dates and contact information, see the Journal Call for papers website.