Selective recovery of glyphosine from glyphosate mother liquor using a modified biosorbent: Competitive substitution adsorption

Here, an easy to prepare, environmentally friendly, and highly efficient biosorbent was synthesized for the se-lective recovery of glyphosine from glyphosate mother liquor. Batch adsorption and continuous fixed-bed column experiments were conducted to determine its adsorption properties and evaluate its potential towards practical applications. The results showed that the biosorbent exhibited a fast adsorption rate and high adsorption capacity (296.1 mg/g) toward glyphosine. Further, the biosorbent performed better under acidic conditions, and was easily regenerated using an alkaline solution, maintaining a high removal efficiency even after 5 adsorption -desorption cycles. Competitive adsorption experiments in binary and ternary systems revealed that the bio-sorbent showed a higher adsorption affinity toward the target glyphosine compared with glyphosate and phosphorous acid (which are the other main constituents of glyphosate mother liquor), enabling the selective recycling of glyphosine. These observations were further supported through density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the adsorption energy. Moreover, fixed-bed column experiments showed that the prepared bio-sorbent could maintain its high performance in actual glyphosate mother liquor. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses revealed that the adsorption mecha-nism is strongly associated with electrostatic attraction and hydrogen bonding between -NH3+ and glyphosine. Overall, the prepared biosorbent can be considered as an excellent candidate for the selective recovery of glyphosine from complicated industrial wastewater systems.

Automated summary

In this study, an easy to prepare, environmentally friendly, and highly efficient biosorbent was synthesized for the selective recovery of glyphosine from glyphosate mother liquor. The biosorbent exhibited fast adsorption rate and high adsorption capacity toward glyphosine and performed better under acidic conditions. It could be easily regenerated using an alkaline solution and maintained high removal efficiency even after 5 adsorption-desorption cycles. Competitive adsorption experiments revealed that the biosorbent showed higher adsorption affinity toward glyphosine compared with glyphosate and phosphorous acid, enabling the selective recycling of glyphosine. The adsorption mechanism was found to be associated with electrostatic attraction and hydrogen bonding between -NH3+ and glyphosine. The biosorbent can be considered an excellent candidate for the selective recovery of glyphosine from complicated industrial wastewater systems.