Remediation of Organic Pollutant for Wastewater Treatment by Employing Sustainable Graphene Oxide/NiO‐ZrO ₂ /Zeolite Ternary Composite Material

The present study employs a novel method for the synthesis of graphene oxide (GO) based ternary composite utilized for the adsorption of Congo red (CR), an anionic dye molecule. The GO was synthesized using the well‐known Hummer's method and subsequently incorporated with binary metal oxide (NiO‐ZrO 2 ) and zeolite by a hydrothermal approach. The GO/NiO‐ZrO 2 /zeolite composite was characterized via different analytical methods, including FTIR, PXRD, FESEM‐EDX, Raman spectroscopy, BET‐surface area and XPS which exhibited encouraging characteristics for CR dye removal. The prepared composite exhibited a specific surface area of 144.48 m 2 /g. To evaluate the removal efficiency of the synthesized composite, optimizations were performed regarding starting dye amount, amount of adsorbent, adsorption time, and solution pH. The optimized parameters were observed at an adsorbent amount of 1.0 g/L, starting dye amount of 60 mg/L, adsorption time of 180 min, and pH of 5 at room temperature. At these conditions, the composite achieved the highest removal efficacy of 97.02 ± 0.32%. The composite was reusable upto third adsorption desorption cycle. Furthermore, the isotherm and kinetics models were applied to investigate the adsorption characteristics of GO/NiO‐ZrO 2 /zeolite with respect to CR dye. The GO/NiO‐ZrO 2 /zeolite composite exhibited the highest adsorption capability of 142.85 mg/g.