Using Pistachio Agricultural Waste to Remove Environmental Pollutants: A Review Study

Agricultural wastes are low-cost absorbents which play an important role in removing waste disposal costs and also in helping to protect the environment. This investigates the efficiency and absorption capacity of various types of adsorbents obtained from hard pistachio shells in removing hazardous pollutants.

The present study is a systematic review which examined articles related to the use of agricultural wastes obtained from hard pistachio shells as absorbents to remove pesticides, drugs, and dyes in various websites such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, ISI Web of Science published from 2010 to 2020.

Adsorbents obtained from the hard shell of pistachio have been considered an adsorbent for water purification for many years. Given the physical and chemical properties of pistachio shell such as high absorption capacity, the presence of various special functional groups, and the modifiability of its structure, it has shown a remarkable performance in removing a wide range of pollutants by the surface absorption method. The obtained results showed that the absorption capacity of the adsorbent could be increased by using temperature processes, chemicals and waves. It was also found that the adsorption process using pistachio shell follows the Langmuir isotherm and the pseudo-second-order kinetics in all cases.

Pistachio waste has a good performance as an absorbent to remove pollutants and can be used raw or modified in water and wastewater treatment. Also, the results showed that pistachio shell is a good precursor for the production of activated carbon.