Contamination of water bodies by heavy metals is a continuously growing environmental issue. High concentrations of mercury (Hg) in river waters are a recognized environmental problem, because it is one of the most toxic heavy metal ions as it causes damage to the central nervous system. Its negative impact has led to the development of different methods for the treatment of effluents contaminated with Hg(II). The aim of this article is to evaluate the use of coffee ( Coffea arabica) residues as adsorbent of Mercury in an aqueous solution. Four kinetic models, including intraparticle diffusion, pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order, and Elovich kinetic models were applied to explore the internal mechanism of mercury adsorption. Results indicate that the pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order models could accurately describe the adsorption process. It means that chemical adsorption play an important role in the adsorption of mercury by activated carbon. Meanwhile, the external mass transfer process is more effective in controlling the activated carbon mercury adsorption according to the fitting result of the pseudo-first-order model. The fitting to Langmuir’s model suggested that the material surface is energetically homogeneous. The technique of contaminated biomass encapsulation proved to be safe for short-term disposal when metal recovery is not desired.

The objective of the present work was to evaluate the hydrodynamic behaviour of a stratified bed filtration column consisting of 4 cm of sand and 2 cm of limestone to remove turbidity and measuring the head loss through the filter in several runs. In this study, two types of sand were used as filtering bed material, one fine and one medium. Crushed limestone was also available. These materials were characterized to determine the average particle diameter, porosity, and permeability coefficient. These were respectively 1.7∙10 ^–4 m, 336.96 and 0.68 m∙day ^–1 for fine sand, 3.3∙10 ^{–4 m}, 654.24 and 2.59 m∙day ^–1 for the medium sand and 1.26∙10–3 m, 388.8 and 8.64 m∙day–1 for crushed limestone. Using these materials, hydrodynamic analyses were carried out using clean water under rapid filtration conditions. In these analyses, different filtration rates were determined to be used in each experiment. Once the filtration rates were determined, the filtration analysis was performed with synthetic turbid water prepared at 8 NTU using tap water and bentonite. From the results obtained, a predictive model was developed based on total head losses for the evaluated filter, maintaining the rapid filtration condition. As a result, a turbidity removal efficiency of 97.7% was obtained with a total head loss of 17.8 cm at a filtration rate of 153 m·day ^–1. The developed model predicted head loss as a function of operating time, filtration rate, and filter depth to maximise turbidity removal. The model showed excellent prediction accuracy with R2 of 0.9999, which indicates that the model predictions are not biased. It was concluded that, due to the porosity of these materials, a stratified bed of sedimentary rocks has a great potential to be used in surface water filtration processes, which implies that it could be used at the rural community level as a form of water treatment, since the