Thin film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) industry has changed the visual communication and colorization of human life. However, the disposal of huge amount of waste glass from LCD panel has become one of the major worldwide environment issues. The utilization of the mentioned waste material in landfilling brought negative environmental impact. Display glass is composed of various metal oxides, and its composition is similar to porous materials such as zeolite and molecular sieve. This characteristic makes it possible to modify disply glass into a multifunctional adsorption material for treating heavy metal wastewater. We used nano-pore forming technology to transform waste panel glass into green glass adsorbent with a specific surface area of 174.6 m2 / g and an average pore size of 9.89 nm. Green glass adsorbent can adsorb and remove lead, copper, cadmium, nickel, zinc and chromium ions in wastewater, and it is a new type of low-cost and high-efficiency adsorption material for removing heavy metal ions. In recent years, the technological development for the separation and recovery of low-concentration valuable substances in water has become a new trend, which not only promoted the reuse of resources, but also gained the autonomy of the valuable metal resources. Since the ion exchange sites had good adsorption selectivity rather than surface asymmetric charge, we tried to adjust surface structure and characteristics of the material by inorganic modification to reduce surface asymmetric charge generation. After modification, the copper/nickel adsorption selectivity increased to 16.3, and the copper/zinc adsorption selectivity increased to 11.2. The specific surface area is 117 m2/g, the average pore size is 9.7 nm. In the real wastewater verification, the selective green glass adsorbent can treat copper-nickel mixed wastewater for 600 times bed volume, also copper-zinc mixed wastewater for 700 times bed volume, separating different kinds of heavy metal ions. The desorption rate of the adsorbate is about 50-60%. Purity of the copper metal recovered from wastewater by electrolytic recovery is >95%. The economic benefit assessment was carried out to provide a service model for the treatment of mixed heavy metal wastewater adsorption according to the experimental results. The return on investment was about 26.8%.

Waste LCD panel glass, heavy metal, adsorption selectivity