ADS-19 1 Utilization of Agricultural Waste Biomass for Treatment of Wastewater Containing Heavy Metal Suryadi Ismadji Department of Chemical Engineering, Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic University, Kalijudan 37, Surabaya 60114, Indonesia suryadiismadji@yahoo.com Abstract Water contamination by toxic organic chemicals and heavy metals from the miscellaneous industrial wastewater discharge keeps becoming worldwide environmental concern. Heavy metals are persistent and therefore difficult to be eliminated naturally from the environment, even at trace amount. Nearly all heavy metals are highly toxic, non-biodegradable, non-thermo degradable and readily accumulate onto toxic levels. To the present, several treatment methods for metal ions removal from aqueous solutions have been established, still biosorption processes retain quite a few advantages against all other mentioned techniques. This paper aims to investigate the possibility to use of cassava peel as alternative sorbents for Cu(II) removal while also cover most aspects in biosorption studies. The physical characteristics of sorbents was probed by nitrogen adsorption measurements and scanning electron microscope while the sorption mechanisms were studied from FTIR, SEM-EDX, X-ray mapping and XPS data. Biosorption experiments were carried out isothermally at three different temperatures (30 o C, 45 o C and 60 o C) in a static mode. The maximum adsorption capacity was attained at the highest temperature. The pH and particle size effects toward biosorption capacity was also discussed. Keywords: Biosorption, agricultural waste, heavy metal Introduction Heavy metal contamination has become a major issue for past decades until now. They originated mainly from discharge of metal containing effluents into water bodies. Undeniably, heavy metals are still on demand in most industries for their technological importance. Therefore, improper treatment of these industries’ waste products would seriously bring deterioration impacts toward human health and environment (Dursun, 2006; Ertugay and Bayhan, 2008). Heavy metal removal from contaminated wastewater can be accomplished by conventional techniques such as chemical precipitation, chelation, filtration, oxidation, membrane separations, evaporation, resin ion exchange, electro-winning and reverse osmosis (Al-Rub, 2006; Dursun, 2006; Ertugay and Bayhan, 2008; Hanif et al., 2007; Satapathy and Natarajan, 2006) which has drawbacks associated with their high energy requirements, ineffectiveness for low metal concentration case and inherent large quantity of toxic waste sludge (Elangovan et al., 2008; Ertugay and Bayhan, 2008; Satapathy and Natarajan, 2006; Yu et al., 2007). Specifically, these technologies are perfect in condition where the heavy metal ions concentration are relatively high (Ertugay and Bayhan, 2008). For dilute cases, adsorption process still prevails. Then again, effective adsorbent such as activated carbon impart considerable economic constraint.