Feasibility of bioremediation of iron-contaminated water using Trichonephila clavipes spider webs

Heavy metals are of great environmental and sanitary importance due to the toxicity they generate, for this reason a wide variety of methods have been studied for their elimination in the water matrix. One of these methodologies is bioremediation, which consists of removing these elements using biomass (microorganisms or plants), live plants (phytoremediation) or biomaterials. In this study, we investigated the technical feasibility of using the Trichonephila clavipes spider web as a biomaterial for iron removal in water by bioremediation. A bibliometric analysis was carried out, where the process variables and an experimental design were defined using the Response Surface Methodology (RSM), and the iron concentrations were measured before and after the experiment using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy by dispersive energy (EDX). We obtained an iron removal of 91.82%, using 28.09 h, 81.42 ppm of iron and 0.062 g of spider web. This work is novel and presents a new methodology for the bioremediation of water contaminated with iron, using spider webs. The results indicate a high efficiency in the removal of iron, which could have important implications in solving environmental and health problems associated with the presence of heavy metals in water.