Effective Use of Orange Juice Residue for Removing Heavy and Radioactive Metals from Environments

Large amounts of orange juice are produced in Japan every yea.. Accompanied by the production of orange juice, large amount of juice residues are also generated in nearly the same amounts with juice. Although, at present, some of these residues are marketed as a feed for cattle after drying and mixing with lime, the marketing price is lower than its production cost and the difference is paid by the consumers as a part of the price of orange juice. In the present work, we developed new innovative use of orange juice residue, a biomass waste, as adsorption gel for removing toxic heavy metals such as lead. arsenic, selenium and so on as well as radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium from environments. The major components of orange juice residue are cellulose. hemicellulose and pectin, which are converted into pectic. acid, an acidic polysaccharide, by means of saponification with concentrated sodium hydroxide solution. In the previous work, we found that crosslinked pectic acid gel strongly an selectively adsorbs lead over other metals such as zinc an copper. On the other hand. it is well known that polysaccharides such as cellulose can be easily phosphorylated and that phosphorylated polysaccharides have high affinity to uranium and thorium as well as some trivalent metals such as ferric iron and aluminum. Taking account of the noticeable characteristics of these polysaccharides, 2 types of adsorption gels were prepared from orange juice residue: one is the gel which was prepared by saponificating the residue followed by crosslinking with epichlorohydrin and another is that prepared by crosslinking the residue followed by phosphorylation. The former gel exhibited excellent adsorptive separation behavior for lead away from zinc owing to high content of pectic acid while the latter gel exhibited that for uranium and thorium. Both types of adsorption gels exhibited high affinity to ferric iron, which enables selective and strong adsorption for some toxic oxo-anions of arsenic (V and III), . selenium and so on via iron loaded on these gels. These results demonstrate that biomass wastes such as orange juice residue can be effectively utilized fer the purpose of removing toxic heavy or radioactive metals existing in trace or small amounts in environments.