Chromium Removal from Water Using Spirodela polyrhiza

Background and Objective: Waste water containing highly toxic chromium hexavalent (Cr VI) causes threat to human, plants and aquatic life, eventually disrupts all components of the environment by its noxious nature.Traditional methods of treatment comprising high capital and operational cost to treat heavy metals from water that do not give environment-friendly solution.The current study focused on evaluating the performance of Spirodela polyrhiza for treatment of Cr (VI) contaminated water.Materials and Methods: Series of batch experiments were performed placing fixed quantity of Spirodela polyrhiza in varying initial Cr (VI) contaminated water.The effect of various experimental parameters such as initial ion concentration, contact time and temperature were also investigated to identify their impact on achieving maximum removal efficiency.Analysis of variance, one-way ANOVA was carried out to classify and test the significance of the results statistically.Results: The result shows that within 7 days of treatment period Spirodela polyrhiza can extract 92-97% of contaminants from water and removal efficiency decreases with the increase of temperature.Bio-concentration factor found to be very high in the plant which signifies appropriateness of the plant for phytoremediation purpose.Conclusion: The obtained results revealed that Spirodela polyrhiza is very effective in extracting Cr (VI) from aqueous solution and can be used as excellent metal extractor.