The Department of Chemical Engineering at the College of Engineering, Al-Qadisiyah University, discussed a Master’s thesis entitled “Recycling Waste Tires into a Carbon-Based Adsorbent for Application in Wastewater Treatment,” submitted by researcher Khadija Hatif Yamer and supervised by Professor Doctor Abbas Khalaf Mohammed.

The thesis aimed to prepare activated carbon extracted from the rubber of damaged car tires and use it as a sustainable adsorbent for removing dyes from aqueous solutions. This was achieved through thermal carbonization of the tire rubber, followed by chemical activation using hydrochloric acid (HCl) and potassium hydroxide (KOH) at a concentration of 4 M. Thermal activation was then applied to enhance the adsorption and porosity properties of the resulting material.

The results showed that the process achieved a significant increase in surface area after activation, reaching 1048 m²/g for KOH-activated carbon and 925 m²/g for HCl-activated carbon, compared to 38 m²/g for the raw material. In evaluating the adsorption performance, the highest removal efficiency was achieved at low temperatures (20 °C) and the lowest initial concentration (50 mg/L). The removal efficiency using KOH carbon reached approximately 98.72% for methyl orange and 95.68% for methylene blue, while HCl carbon achieved removal efficiencies of 97.82% and 94.12%, respectively.