Facile adsorption of organophosphate pesticides over HKUST-1 MOFs.

The recovery of organophosphate pesticides (OPPs) from aqueous solutions is imperative considering their agricultural and environmental implications. Among various mitigation approaches used for OPPs' removal, adsorption offers many advantageous features for OPPs abatement owing to its benign nature, cost-effective processing, and non-requirement of excessive equipment. This research describes the adsorptive removal of three organophosphate pesticides (OPPs) namely chlorpyrifos (CPF), methyl parathion (MP), and malathion (MAL) by HKUST-1 (HKUST = Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) metal-organic framework (MOF). The synthesis of HKUST-1 MOFs was confirmed by various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques. The adsorption kinetics was systematically investigated by varying three parameters to include solution pH, contact time, and initial pesticide concentration. Among all the three pesticides, HKUST-1 showed enhanced removal of CPF in terms of pH, resulting in an adsorption capacity of 1.82 mg·g. However, under the effect of contact time at 60 min, the adsorption capacity of HKUST-1 for PM, MAL, and CPF were computed to be 1.83, 1.79, and 0.44 mg·g, respectively. Besides, HKUST-1 showed a remarkable performance towards adsorptive removal of MAL (14.01 mg·g at 10 mg·L concentration) with linear increase in adsorption capacity as the function of initial pesticide concentration. The MOFs were also able to retain ca. 50% of their adsorption efficiency over the course of five cycles of adsorptive removal of CP. In the future, a comprehensive data table showing the performance of various MOFs against various OPPs can be constructed on the basis of parameters used in this study.