Sustentabilidade na geração de resíduos domiciliares a partir de esponjas de lavar louças para fins de novo material adsorvente e seus custos operacionais

Abstract

Sustainability is currently a focus of great commercial and industrial importance, as well as ways to improve its management. Thus, the reuse of dish sponges is a format that establishes a new direction of use as a low-cost adsorbent, as sustainability is an area that seeks to integrate engineering principles with solutions aimed at environmental preservation, energy efficiency and social responsibility, in several areas especially for waste management. Within this context, the present proposal aims to develop an adsorbent from discarded household dish sponges, undergoing characterization aiming at its morphological composition and chemical composition with the application of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Zeta potential. To this end, the format involving textural analysis aimed to obtain the adsorption capacity of the evaluated material; entering into cost studies, to obtain dish sponges and procedures attributed to the production of the adsorbent. Thus, the equilibrium study for the analysis of emerging contaminants was applied to the drug diclofenac with the occurrence of average removal of the contaminant used, assigned a value of 40 mg g-1, which represents a 98% reduction in its removal. However, given the analysis focused on the reduction of the methylene blue contaminant, a contaminant reduction of 26.4 mg g-1 was obtained, that is, it represents a reduction of 85% after the adsorption analysis used. Therefore, the vision of applying a new sustainable adsorbent option in particular, as it has interactions with the studied contaminant, allows its use on a large scale, as it presents a large volume of material to be collected and used for this purpose. Therefore, within the sustainability aspect, cost management must be paramount for materials from discards, due to problems involving logistical aspects and procedures related to cleaning and adsorbent activation processes. However, the fixed and variable costs are diluted and attractive for such an application with collection values per unit of sponges around R$0.49 cents, when listed in the collection profile, which was assigned to a municipality located in northwestern region of Paraná, in which selective collection was structured with the inclusion of dishwashing sponges.