Book Description

Water is essential for all living beings. The immense solvent power of water has put in uses such as washing, cooling, flushing away waste products from houses, industries and mines. The water bodies are getting polluted due to different human activities. This warrants the attention of the environmentalists and researchers to find out ways to remove pollutants of water. The heavy metal pollution of water is most alarming as the metals are not biodegradable. In spite of many enormous physiological importance of metals when in trace amount, these can become toxic for the cell when they exceed the permissible limit. Therefore, continuous research is going on for finding the technologies which can remove the heavy metals from the water bodies without having adverse effect on echosystem and are cost effective and efficient even at low level of concentration. The physico-chemical techniques employed for the remediation of heavy metals are not costeffective and echo-friendly. These techniques can not be used for very low concentration of heavy metals in water bodies. The bioremediation which encompasses biosorption process has proved highly cost-effective, environment-friendly, efficient and can be used for removing the metals at very low concentration even. The book describes a study undertaken for bioremediation removal of some heavy metals by the biomass of bacterial species. The developed method has been employed for removing the heavy metals from wastewater samples. The speciation of the metals has been made using biosorption process. Mechanism of the biosorption process for the removal of the heavy metals from the aqueous solutions has also been described. It is expected that the book can serve as a text and reference materials for the readers and can be useful for the researchers and environmental administrators. The author is indebted to her family members for their kind support. The author wishes to express her appreciation to the publisher for bringing out the book in a short span of time. The author is also thankful to Sadiq Saeed for the layout of the book. Suggestions and comments for the improvement of the book will be gratefully acknowledged.