Biosorption of Heavy Metals: Biological Approach to Control the Industrial Waste

Introduction

All over the world ceaseless growth of mankind has resulted into the more demand of commodities or goods which are meant to be life supportive for them. As a result industrialization occurs on large scale to fulfill their requirements by introducing new alternatives (Ahemad & Khan, 2012; Ahemad & Malik, 2011). Large scale production of such commodities by industries did huge damage to the environment. Industrial effluent contains several toxic materials including heavy metals were drained into several water bodies like river, lakes, ponds etc. during their various operations. These effluents drastically ruin not only water quality but also damage the soil fertility as well (Singh et al., 2010; Ahemad & Malik, 2011). The type of industries and their raw materials decides quantity and quality of the emerged wastes including both biodegradable as well as non-biodegradable. Among non-biodegradable wastes copper, chromium, nickel, cadmium etc. are widespread contaminants of soil, water and these are most common heavy metals (Ahemad & Malik, 2011). Several heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and lead are highly poisonous and fatal to human as well as animals. Ordinarily, some heavy metals are either essential nutrients (typically iron, cobalt and zinc) or relativity harmless such as ruthenium, silver and indium. They serve as micronutrients for prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes in their life cycle, but high concentration of these metals could be toxic (Ahemad, 2012). Several plants as well as microbes respond to heavy metals by diverse biological processes like biosorption to their cell wall and entrapment in their capsule, oxidation and reduction, precipitation, complexation etc. (Lawrence et al., 2010). These responses may help significantly in the remediation of heavy metals from the contaminated sites.

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