Low-cost bio-adsorbent for emerging inorganic pollutants

Abstract

Natural and human activities result in various kinds of serious environmental detrimental issues, which affect the environment in ways like global warming and generation of wastewater that contains a considerable amount of pollutants. As safe water is a worldwide need and valued commodity, which is available in limited amount and that is why there is a need to remove the contaminants from water and deliver safe and fresh drinking water to the people. In this chapter, the authors have focused on the removal of emerging inorganic pollutants, defined as those pollutants that are not commonly detected but have a significant impact on human health and environment, such as selenium, silver, thallium, copper, chlorinated paraffin, and perfluoroalkyl compounds. Thus, the primary objective is to make the readers understand various low-cost adsorbents, which helps in removing emerging inorganic pollutants. Low-cost adsorbents are focused because they are inexpensive, readily available, environment-friendly, and also require less processing that invigorates the author’s interest in these types of adsorbents. A brief discussion about different sources of low-cost adsorbents, mentioning a suitable adsorbent specific for emerging inorganic contaminant and its appropriate mechanism of action has been focused in this chapter. As we all know that waste material has minimal or no use. Thus it is an effort to make them valuable by highlighting in brief the usage of low-cost adsorbents. © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.