Wastewater from textile industries contains persistent contaminants that require low-cost, efficient, and eco-friendly treatment solutions. This work evaluates the performance of acid-treated sugarcane peel (ATSP) as a sustainable adsorbent for textile effluent treatment, compared with untreated sugarcane peel (UTSP). Sorption experiments were performed under optimized conditions (120 min contact time, pH 5–6, 20 mg adsorbent in 25 mL effluent). ATSP achieved 85% pollutant removal against 68% for UTSP. The Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetics best described the adsorption process, confirming monolayer chemisorption with a maximum capacity of 50.04 mg/g. Thermodynamic analysis confirmed an endothermic and spontaneous process, while scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) analyses revealed enhanced porosity and active functional groups on adsorbent. After five reuse cycles, the adsorbent retained 60% efficiency. Unlike previous studies focused on single-solute dye systems, this work provides comprehensive mechanistic and techno-economic evaluation of phosphoric-acid-treated sugarcane peel for real textile effluent remediation. Thus acid-treated sugarcane peel gave strong potential as an effective, sustainable, and reusable material for the treatment of textile wastewater.
Abouzied et al. (2026) studied this question.