Faced with the most stringent regulations, nowadays heavy
metals are the environmental priority pollutants and are becoming
one of the major problems worldwide. Therefore these toxic heavy
metals should be removed from the wastewater to protect the people
and the environment. Methods such as chemical precipitation,
ion-exchange, membrane filtration, and electrochemical treatment
technologies. are being currently used to remove heavy metal ions
from waste waters ([3] and references within). The application of
the aforementioned methods becomes economically unviable for
the removal of heavy metals at lower concentrations [4]. In those
cases, adsorptive treatment is appropriate. Adsorption is now recognized
as an effective and economic method for heavy metal
wastewater treatment. The process offers flexibility in design and
operation and in many cases will produce high-quality treated
effluent. In addition, because adsorption is sometimes reversible,
adsorbents can be regenerated by suitable desorption processes.
A number of materials have been used to remove heavy metals
from wastewater. Several recent publications utilized inexpensive
naturally-occurring lignocelluloses substrates, e.g. wheat straw,
peanut shell, moss peat, bagasse fly ash, tree fern, gram husk, coconut
coir pith and saw dust for heavy metal removal [5–8]. These
substrates were found to have good adsorption capacity due to substances inherently associated with cellulose such as lignin, tannin
and pectin, which contain polyphenolic, aliphatic hydroxyl and
carboxylic groups. The main disadvantages of these materials are
their low resistance to abrasive forces in batch or column applications
and leaching of some organics (water extractives) during
adsorption [9]. In adsorption processes, adsorbents with high specific
surface areas are needed. Small pores, such as micropores and
mesopores, result in a large specific surface area responsible for
adsorption. Pore size, pore size distribution and specific surface
area, as well as pore surface chemistry, are the major factors in
the adsorption process [10]. Silica aerogels meet these conditions
because they are extremely porous (up to 99%) nanostructure systems
with high specific surface areas (500–1000 m2 g1), low density
(as low as 5 kg/m3) and they exhibit high adsorption capacity
for the removal of heavy metals from waste waters, which are
comparable or even exceed that of commonly used adsorbents
[11–15]. Furthermore, one of the most important properties of silica
aerogels is the possibility to modify their chemical surface with
the incorporation of organic functional groups [10]. Though mesoporous
silica as sorbents should be more expensive than the use of
low-cost natural adsorbents (lignite, coconut waste, wood, activated
carbon, etc.), the former offer several advantages making
them more attractive.