An eco-friendly approach for minimizing pollution of metal from municipal solid waste leachate in India

Municipal solid waste (MSW) leachate management has become an important issue worldwide. The present study evaluated the potential of indigenous fungi for biosorption of Cd2+ from leachate. Three isolates-Trichoderma harzianum, Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus were selected based on their ability to exclude the Cd2+ at the preliminary stage. Among these, Trichoderma harzianum was found to be an excellent fungus for cadmium absorption. The highest biosorption rate for Cd2+ was achieved under the conditions: temperature 45 °C (64.87%), pH 6.0 (64.78%) and spore concentration [105 cfu ml−1] (64.41%). The obtained data indicated that the developed fungal consortium is very efficient and effective for cadmium removal (72.41%), thereby demonstrating that it is a promising solution for removing toxic metals from MSW leachate.