Available online www.jocpr.com Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, 2016, 8(8):1255-1262 Research Article ISSN : 0975-7384 CODEN(USA) : JCPRC5 1255 The Removal of Iron from Landfill Leachateby Rice Husk Packed Bed Column Monik Kasman 1 and Shaliza Ibrahim 2 1 Department of Environmental Engineering Department, Batanghari University, Broni, Jambi, Indonesia 2 department of Civil Engineering, University of Malaya, Lembah Pantai 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia _____________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT Rice husk and its modified forms have been proven effective in reducing pollutants from water and wastewater, including metals and non metals. But, to date, only few studies have focused on landfill leachate. Landfill leachates may contain large amounts of organic matter where humic-type constituents consist an important group, as well as ammonia-nitrogen, heavy metals, chlorinated organic and inorganic salts. Iron were found in significant quantities metal at the landfill site. This study purposes to investigate the ability of rice husk to reduce Iron (Fe) from landfill leachate. Landfill leachate was pumped and filled by gravity into the rice husk packed bed column. The effect of influent flow rate to adsorption capacity was studied by varying flow rate of 5 mL/min and 10 mL/min. The effluent-influent concentration ratio C e /C 0 (%) as a function of throughput volume (L) was used to represent the breakthrough curve in column systems. Result shows that the flow rate of 5 mL/min was favorable to achieve higher removal rates with the percentage of iron was 64%.At breakthrough time, the iron effluent concentration reached on 0.571 and 1.903 mg/L for flow rate of 5 mL/min and 10 mL/min respectively. Keywords : Rice husk, Packed bed column, Iron, Landfill leachate _____________________________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION Landfill often cause problems due to lack of management. Landfill leachate for instance, a liquid which is formed by leaching process of disposal waste then percolating or infiltrating into groundwater then to surface water, can contaminate groundwater, soil and surface water. It contains complex contaminants including organic matter (both biodegradable and non-biodegradable carbon), ammonia-nitrogen, heavy metals, chlorine organic and inorganic salts. Iron generated by domestical and industrial waste is common heavy metal found in landfill leachate. Thus, it is a challenge to find appropriate treatment to reduce contaminat on landfill leachate. Due to its compelexicity contaminants, combined treatment of physical, chemical, and biological have been usually used to improve the treatment efficiency of landfill leachate[8,17]. Physico-chemical treatment has been found to be suitable not only for the removal of heavy metals from landfill leachate, but also for refining of biologically treated leachate [9]. Adsorption is a common method used in physical-chemical treatment. This method has been studied on batch scale experiment and column experiment [1-2, 4-6, 9-15,17-24]. Some findings on leachate treatment using rice husk as adsorbent has been reported. It was reported that column filled with rice husk can eliminate heavy metals. Furthermore, the behaviour of column in these studies noted that adsorption capacities occurs significantly [15,20,22]. Similar reports related to use of rice husk as adsorbent also stated that rice husk was considerably used in adsorption process [1-4, 6,7, 11-14, 16-20, 23, 24]. Besides, its local