Arsenic is a toxic heavy metal widely distributed in the Earth’s
crust, which has also been used in pesticides and antibiotics for
agricultural and medical uses. Thus, it can get into water systems,
especially groundwater aquifers, from various ways. Drinking of
arsenic contaminated water has become a serious threat to the
public health and has affected millions of people across the world
(Mudhoo et al., 2011). As a result, the US Environmental Protection
Agency has set the arsenic standard for drinking water to a level of
less than10 lg/L. This stringent arsenic standard inevitably requires many water utilities to upgrade their present treatment systems or to consider new purification technologies. During the past
decades, much effort has been spent developing high-efficiency
and cost-effective adsorbents for arsenic removal, such as metal