Industrial waste constitutes the major source of various kinds of metal pollution
in natural water. There are at least 20 metals which cannot be degraded or destroyed.
The important toxic metals are Cu, Ni and Zn. There are numerous methods currently
employed to remove and recover the metals from our environment and many physicochemical
methods have been proposed for their removal from wastewater. Adsorption is
one of the alternatives for such cases and is an effective purification and separation
technique used in industry especially in water and wastewater treatments. Cost is an
important parameter for comparing the adsorbent materials. Therefore, there is
increasing research interest in using alternative low-cost adsorbents. The use of tea
waste as the low-cost adsorbents was investigated as a replacement for current costly
methods of removing heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. The experiment results
showed that maximum removal of Nickel ion by tea waste is 94% and for Copper & Zinc
ion are 89% & 90% respectively at optimum condition.