Nutrients from wastewater are a major source of pollution
because they can cause significant impact on the ecosystem. Accordingly, it is important that the nutrient concen trations are kept to admissible levels to the receiving environment. Often regulatory limits are set on the
maximum allowable concentrations in the effluent. Therefore, wastewater must be treated to meet safe levels of discharge. In this study, laboratory
investigation of the efficiency of packed bed filters to remove nitrate,
ammonium and phosphate from aqueous solutions were conducted. Sand
and sand augmented with hydrochloric acid treated biochar (SBC) were used as packing media. Synthetic wastewater solution was prepared with PO 4 3- , NO 3

, NH 4 + concentrations 20, 10, 50 mg/L, respectively. Each experiment ran for a period of five days; samples from the effluent were collected on
alternate days. All experiments were duplicated. Over the experiment
period, the average removal efficiency of PO 4 3- , NO 3

, NH 4 + were 99.2%,
72.9%, 96.7% in the sand packed columns and 99.2%, 82.3%, 97.4% in the SBC packed columns, respectively. Although, the presence of biochar in
the packing media had little effect on phosphate and ammonium removal, it significantly improved nitrate removal