Recent Overview on the Abatement of Pesticide Residues in Water by Photocatalytic Treatment Using TiO2

Abstract

The water bodies' pollution with phytosanitary products can pose a serious threat to aquatic ecosystems and drinking water resources. The usual appearance of pesticides in surface water, waste water and groundwater has driven the search for proper methods to remove persistent pesticides. Although typical biological treatments of water offer some advantages such as low cost and operability, many investigations referring to the removal of pesticides have suggested that in many cases they have low effectiveness due to the limited biodegradability of many agrochemicals. In recent years, research for new techniques for water detoxification to avoid these disadvantages has led to processes that involve light, which are called advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). Among the different semiconductor (SC) materials tested as potential photocatalysts, titanium dioxide (TiO 2) is the most popular because of its photochemical stability, commercial availability, non-toxic nature and low cost, high photoactivity, ease of preparation in the laboratory, possibility of doping with metals and non-metals and coating on solid support. Thus, in the present review, we provide an overview of the recent research being developed to photodegrade pesticide residues in water using TiO 2 as photocatalyst.