Fruit Peels as a Sustainable Waste for the Biosorption of Heavy Metals in Wastewater: A Review

One of the environmental challenges that is currently negatively affecting the ecosystem is the continuous discharge of untreated industrial waste into both water sources and soils. For this reason, one of the objectives of this qualitative study of exploratory-descriptive scope was the review of scientific articles in different databases-Scopus, Web of Science, and Science Direct-published from 2010 to 2021 on the use of fruit peels as a sustainable waste in the removal of heavy metals present in industrial wastewater. For the selection of articles, the authors used the PRISMA guide as a basis, with which 210 publications were found and 93 were compiled. Considering the reported work, a content analysis was carried out using NVivo 12 Plus and VOSviewer 1.6.17 software. The results show that the fruits mentioned in these publications are lemon, banana, mango, tree tomato, pineapple, passion fruit, orange, coconut, avocado, apple, lulo, and tangerine. However, no studies were found with lulo and tree tomato peels. On the other hand, the heavy metals removed with the selected fruit peels were Pb+2, Cr+3, Cr+6, Ni+2, Cd+2, As+5, Cu+2, and Zn+2.

Automated summary

This study aims to review scientific articles published between 2010 and 2021 on the use of fruit peels as a sustainable waste for removing heavy metals from industrial wastewater. The findings show that lemon, banana, mango, and other fruit peels can effectively remove heavy metals from wastewater.