Attachment 1:
Toxic pollutant contents in aquatic environments become a serious problem for human health and ecological systems. Various industrial activities in worldwide discharge a harmful wastewaters without any treatment. Although the increase in renewable energy uses, annual petroleum production rests also well important. For example, Algeria's petroleum and other condensate production averaged more than 1.6 million barrel/day in 2017 (Reference).
To avoid the coming problems of water scarcity, the treatment of industrial effluents is necessary before their discharge in the environment. For this reason, several techniques are used for pollutants removal from the aquatic medium such as biological treatments (Reference), photodegradation (Tian et al., 2012), reverse osmosis (Ritchie et al, 2002), coagulation (Li et al, 2003), membrane separation (Cheng et al., 2012), and adsorption (Ouakouak et al., 2019). The latter seems to be attractive due to its simplicity, efficiency, availability and low-cost operation [3]. The selection of a potential adsorbent based first on its porous structure which must provide a larger surface area (SBET, m2/g) and a high pore volume (VP, cm3/g) [4]. Among bio-adsorbents, carbonaceous materials are considered as the most popular adsorbent and attracted more attention in the existing literature (Tran et al., 2019). The reduction of the activated carbons (ACs) production costs is necessary to develop its use for water treatment and other applications. Several agricultural wastes like wood, tomato stem (Fu et al., 2017), banana peels (Vilardi et al, 2018), olive stones (Cherik and Louhab, 2018), and carrot waste (Changmai et al. 2018) have been employed as low-cost precursor to develop efficient ACs. In Algeria, a large amount of date palm kernels is generated annually without any valorization, which may serve as a good source of carbonaceous materials.