Landfill leachate treatment using copas

Human activities always generate solid wastes. Solid wastes is usually handled by processes such as, collection, transportation, sorting, recycling and disposal at dumping sites. As a result, the dumping sites become concentrated with wastes and may affect the environment. Most dumping sites generate landfill leachate which could pollute the water body nearby. Examples of chemical characteristic of leachate is shown in Table 1. It includes heavy metals such as cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb) (Fadil, 1994 and Norhayati et al., 1994). As shown by some reports, heavy metal can be removed by activated carbon (Reed, et al.,1995). Activated carbon also can reduce COD and metals from landfill leachate (Salim, 1992). By using the concept of activated carbon adsorption, some agricultural base materials were studied for their ability to remove heavy metals from water samples (Fadil et al., 1994). It is the intention of this paper to present a report on the ability of carbon which was made of oil palm shell to be used for heavy metal removal from water and landfill leachate samples.