Lamellar mesoporous Mg-containing silicate adsorbents derived from iron ore tailings for high-efficient adsorption of mycotoxins and antibiotics

Iron ore tailing (IOT), as a typical solid waste, is in urgent need of high value-added utilization. The resource endowment and silicate composite characteristics owe IOT inherent potentials to prepare environmental functional materials. However, the Si-O-Si(M) bonds in IOT, having both ionic and covalent bonding properties, are very strong, which makes IOT difficult to efficiently utilize. Herein, sodium silicate, magnesium sulfate and potassium sodium tartrate (PST) were simultaneously introduced to promote the reconstitution of IOT as lamellar mesoporous Mg-containing silicate adsorbent. The adsorbents possess high specific area of 280.18 m 2 /g and abundant active sites, whose adsorption capacities for aflatoxin B 1 (AFB 1 ) and tetracycline hydrochloride (TC) were 30.05 mg/g, 217.39 mg/g, respectively. It is expected that the present work could lay a theoretical and experimental foundation for the high value-added functional utilization of IOT.