ORIGINAL PAPER Possible Use of the Algae Lessonia nigrescens as a Biosorbent: Differences in Copper Sorption Behavior Using Either Blades or Stipes Henrik K. Hansen 1 • Claudia Gutie ´rrez 1 • Alejandro Madrid 2 • Rafaela Jimenez 1 • Habib Larach 1 Received: 5 April 2016 / Accepted: 16 August 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract Sorption experiments for copper removal were carried out using two different parts of the brown seaweed Lessonia nigrescens (L. nigrescens) as biosorbent. The effect of initial pH, contact time, mass–volume-ratio (M/V) and initial metal concentration was evaluated. The best adsorption capacities were obtained at pH = 3.2 ± 0.2, and to reach equilibrium, 7 days of contact time were necessary for both sections of the seaweed. The maximum experimental uptake achieved was 54.5 mg Cu g -1 by the blades of the alga and 58.5 mg Cu g -1 by the stipes. Both Langmuir and Freundlich models described the equilibrium sorption isotherms very well when using stipes as biosor- bent, but the fitting was poor with both models when blades were used as biosorbent. The Ho and McKay pseudo-sec- ond order model described the sorption kinetics for stipes and blades satisfactorily. Keywords Copper uptake Á Biosorption Á Algae Á Lessonia nigrescens Introduction Chile is one of the largest copper producers in the world and the country with the largest reserves of this red metal worldwide [1]. A way to obtain copper is based on smelting of copper sulphides. During the processing of the copper sulphide minerals a large amount of wastewater that contains heavy metals, such as copper, is produced. The copper concentration in smelter wastewater exceeds the local threshold value [2]. Thus, a treatment of the wastewater it is required before returning the water to the ecosystem. Usually, heavy metals present in wastewaters are removed by different treatments, such as chemical pre- cipitation, reverse osmosis, electrodialysis, ionic exchange, etc.; but these technologies present the disadvantages of being too expensive, using great amount of reagents, gen- erating large amount of toxic sludge or being inefficient when treating large volumes with low heavy metal con- centration. Biosorption could be a promising alternative to treat large volumes of diluted metal-contaminated wastewaters, because the biosorbent material can be regenerated several times and the biosorbents are abundant and cheap [3–5]. Seaweeds have shown good results as biosorbents of heavy metals [6, 7]. Biosorption by sea- weeds is based on several mechanisms, including ion-ex- change and complexation with oxidation/reduction reactions in some cases [3, 8]. L. nigrescens, a brown seaweed found all along the Chilean coast, showed to be a good biosorbent in the removal of arsenic and cadmium in previous work [5, 9], and therefore in this work the capacity to remove copper from wastewaters for possible metal recovery is studied. Brown seaweeds have in their structure alginic acid and fucoidan, which are responsible for the heavy metal removal from solutions [3]. & Henrik K. Hansen henrik.hansen@usm.cl 1 Departamento de Ingenieria Quı ´mica y Ambiental, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Avda. Espan ˜a 1680, 2340000 Valparaı ´so, Chile 2 Departamento de Quı ´mica, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Exactas, Universidad de Playa Ancha, Avda. Leopoldo Carvallo 270, Playa Ancha, 2340000 Valparaı ´so, Chile 123 Waste Biomass Valor DOI 10.1007/s12649-016-9663-5