In the present study, biochar prepared from green wastes was investigated about the effects of pyrolysis environment on its characteristics and purposively employed to remove As(III) in column-based treatments. Characterization analyses were performed to investigate the insightful of the biochar prepared from corncob and sugarcane biomasses under comparatively lower temperatures (350, and 450 degrees C), and retention times (1 h) in locally made furnace and named CCB@350, CCB@450, and SCB@350 and SCB@450, respectively. In addition, a conventional method (CM) was used for biochar preparation from the same feedstocks and named CMCCB and CMSCB, respectively. The idea was to adopt resource efficient pyrolysis methods to synthesize biochar for multiple applications. Biochar characterizations demonstrated that lower temperature was found sufficient to prepare biochar from the green wastes and met all the characteristics including clear pore size and structure (i.e., 2.301 mu m pore size in CCB@350), elemental compositions (>76 At% of carbon), presence of large number of functional groups and thermally super stable (>20% residual mass). Column-based experiments found variations in the adsorption capacity for As(III) in different samples. However, biochar prepared from sugarcane biomass possessed good As(III) adsorption capacity (>92%) for lower arsenic concentration. Thus, it was concluded that biochar synthesized at low pyrolysis temperatures was found appealing with good mineralogical, morphological, elemental, and thermal characteristics and possessed acceptable adsorption capacity for low arsenic contaminated water and the pyrolysis method can be optimized as a resource efficient technology. [GRAPHICS] .
