Exploring <i>Arachis hypogaea</i> bio-waste sorption potential for phytofiltration of acridine orange dye from wastewater as a new candidate for green revolution

Adsorption is a desirable, environmental friendly strategy for eliminating toxins from industrial effluents using natural resources. The effectiveness of phytofiltering an industrially significant chemical: Acridine orange dye from aqueous media utilizing inexpensive <i>Arachis hypogaea</i> (peanut) bio-waste as an adsorbent has been studied in this work. The major principle of this study is surface chemistry that made biosorption possible by tuning a number of adsorption-related variables, including contact duration of the solution with adsorbent, temperature, pH, adsorbent dose, and stirring rate. 1.2 g of adsorbent dose, 60 °C temperature, 90 min contact time, 100 rpm agitation speed and pH 4 was found to be best conditions giving more than 90% dye removal. FT-IR and SEM were used to assess the surface of biomaterial along with Langmuir, Freundlich, and Temkin isotherms. Freundlich isotherm proved to be more effective with <i>R</i>² value of 0.995 along with pseudo-second order model and 79.36 mg/g adsorption capacity. Thermodynamically the procedure is exothermic in nature. These favorable results indicated the suitability of <i>Arachis hypogaea</i> bio-waste for removal of acidic contaminants by phytofiltration on a large scale.