Testing the sorption of economic metals from seawater on waste biomass: a preliminary feasibility study

The development of the modern and sustainable era of humanity has been built on continuing reliance of many scarce resources. These are primarily extracted from limited geological sources, with estimated capacity in the decade to century ranges. It is also possible to extract them from the saline environment. These exist in near constant concentration, in equilibrium between the influx by geographical erosion, and the deposition into the sea floor. This work aimed to report efforts to quantify the performance of methods intended to absorb these resources using low cost biomass adsorbents. These were compared against materials in a nano-cellulose membrane. The nanocellulose proved to be a significant impediment, despite literature to the contrary, but did improve our understanding.