An integrated approach towards sustainable wastewater treatment and biofuel production: A phytotechnological study on defatted residual seed biomass of Datura stramonium L.

Water pollution and diminishing fossil based fuel reserves with their deleterious exhaust gases are worldwide major environmental and economic problems. Datura stramonium L. species greatly grows wild in the most parts of temperate regions of the world. The biodiesel production from the seed oil of D. stramonium L. have been reported in literature. However, no study has been found regarding the use of defatted residual seed biomass of D. stramonium L. for the wastewater treatment. An integrated approach towards sustainable wastewater treatment and biofuel production using D. stramonium L. seed biomass leads to clean and sustainable environment/energy. Therefore, for the first time in literature, the defatted residual seed biomass of D. stramonium L. was mainly investigated as a sustainable green generation alternative biosorbent source for the treatment of colored wastewater in the present study. To test the wastewater cleaning ability of biosorbent, basic red 46 was selected as a common harmful model synthetic dye. The equilibrium, thermodynamic and kinetic modeling studies were performed to elucidate the dye biosorption behavior of biosorbent. Freundlich and the pseudo-second-order models provided the best fit to the isotherm and kinetic data, respectively. The dye biosorption was thermodynamically a feasible and spontaneous process. The maximum dye biosorption capacity of biosorbent was found to be 166.228 mg g-1 . As a result, this study showed that the seed biomass of D. stramonium L. could be utilized as a highly efficient as well as cost-effective material for both colored wastewater treatment and biodiesel production.