Dias et al. 2021 - Nutshell biosorbents for cadmium, lead, and mercury

Dias and colleagues tested nutshell wastes as biosorbents for cadmium, lead, and mercury removal from contaminated water. This is direct a2 remediation evidence, including tests in mineral-water matrix.

Key numbers

The abstract reports that hazelnut shells delivered efficiencies above 90% for all elements in ultrapure water and above 90% for Pb and Hg in mineral water.

Table 2 discussion states that after 48 h, hazelnut shells removed about 98% of Cd, 97% of Pb, and 90% of Hg in ultrapure-water assays.

For spiked mineral water, the paper reports that after 48 h hazelnut shells removed 92% of Pb, 90% of Hg, and 73% of Cd, showing matrix-related loss of cadmium performance.

Methods (brief)

The paper compared almond, hazelnut, peanut, pistachio, and walnut shells as biosorbents in mono-element and multi-element assays. Metals were measured in ultrapure water and natural mineral water under controlled contact-time experiments, with Cd and Pb by atomic absorption and Hg by cold-vapor atomic fluorescence.

Implications

Certification: Not packaged-water occurrence evidence. It belongs in the mitigation/remediation lane as a biosorbent-performance paper.

Courses: Useful for showing how a food-waste-derived sorbent can behave differently in ultrapure versus mineral-water matrices.

App: Context-only mitigation evidence.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Remediation evidence — drivers and interventions
• Cadmium
• Lead
• Mercury, Total

Verification notes

Recovered from the corpus-rescreen queue under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule. Products and ingredients remain intentionally empty because the study is a contaminated-water remediation experiment, not a consumer mineral-water survey.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.