The compost produced based on municipal/urban organic solid waste (RSOM/U), is a valuable resource as a biofertilizer for agriculture, gardening, forestry and especially for soil remediation, whose production contributes to sustainable development through recycling of organic matter and nutrients. However, due to the raw materials used, the compost can have a significant content of heavy metals such as: cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), arsenic (As), mercury (Hg) and selenium (Se), and contaminants such as potentially toxic trace elements that harm human health. These components can accumulate in plant tissues by absorption, giving rise to the possibility of being bioavailable to humans and animals. The fungal bioremediation of heavy metals in RSOM/U compost is highly efficient, cost-effective, available and friendly to the environment, therefore the removal of metals through this technique is a ...

An activated carbon (adsorbent) was prepared from a forestry residual biomass (Capparis scabrida sawdust) by chemical activation with ZnCl2. The adsorbent was tested in kinetic experiments to remove three anionic dyes widely used in the food industry: tartrazine (TR), brilliant scarlet 4R (BS4R) and brilliant blue (BB). The adsorbent was able to remove the dyes in different intensities, and the revealed order of their adsorption ability was BS4R>TR>BB. Most of the kinetic data fit best to the pseudo-second order model; however, high accordance with other models indicates that there is more than one phenomenon to explain the adsorption process. Analyzing the data that fit well to the pseudo-second order model and considering that the equilibrium was reached, the equilibrium adsorption capacity (qe) for TR was 55.3 mg/g (when the AC load was 1 g/l and the TR initial concentration was 50 mg...