Remediation of water contaminants

Abstract

The draining of organic pollutants and other toxicants from different industries such as leather, paper, pharmaceutical, steel plant to the water body may cause hazardous effect on the human health, aquatic life, and environment. Water treatment is a crucial step before discharge into environment. For this purpose, in last few years, there has been an enormous research and development for water treatment using various methodologies. Among them, for the removal of the contaminants present in water body, physical adsorption and degradation has been developed as advanced method due to its superiority to others in terms of high efficiency, economic suitability, and easy to design and operation. To consider this as a major and challenging problem for several hazardous impacts on the human and aquatic objects, several materials have been used for the remediation of water. These fascinating materials include semiconducting materials and other metal oxides/metal with certain modifiers including carbonaceous materials, metal, and nonmetal in forms of composites or dopants which in turn can improve the property of the individuals for the purpose of water remediation. The present chapter highlights effect of water pollution and its remediation using different materials.