A Scientific Research at the Faculty of Pharmacy, International University for Science and Technology (IUST) on Pollutant Removal from Water Using Pine Cones

As part of supporting scientific research and enhancing studies that contribute to sustainable environmental solutions, a scientific research paper entitled “A facile green approach for developing pine cone based adsorbent for effective malachite green removal” has been published in the journal Next Materials, published by the international publishing house Elsevier, and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (ESCI) databases, with a Q2 ranking according to SCImago (SJR).

​The study discusses the development of a low-cost and eco-friendly adsorbent material derived from thermally treated Syrian pine cones at 600 °C, aimed at removing malachite green dye from aqueous solutions.

​The study’s results demonstrated that the resulting carbon material possesses a mesoporous structure with a specific surface area of 185.6 m2/g. Furthermore, the dye removal efficiency reached a high of 95.87%, with an adsorption capacity of 17.59mg/g after 48 hours.

​The experimental results also showed a good fit with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, while the data from applied adsorption isotherm models, including the adsorption energy, indicated that the process is predominantly physical adsorption.

​The study highlights the potential of utilizing pine cone wastes to develop effective and low-cost adsorbents, providing a promising option for treating industrial wastewater contaminated with dyes.