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Efficient elimination of environmental pollutants through sorption-reduction and photocatalytic degradation using nanomaterials

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Abstract

With the rapid development of industrial, large amounts of different inorganic and organic pollutants are released into the natural environments. The efficient elimination of environmental pollutants, i.e., photocatalytic degradation of persistent organic pollutants into nontoxic organic/inorganic chemicals, in-situ solidification or sorption-reduction of heavy metal ions, is crucial to protect the environment. Nanomaterials with large surface area, active sites and abundant functional groups could form strong surface complexes with different kinds of pollutants and thereby could efficiently eliminate the pollutants from the aqueous solutions. In this review, we mainly focused on the recent works about the synthesis of nanomaterials and their applications in the efficient elimination of different organic and inorganic pollutants from wastewater and discussed the interaction mechanism from batch experimental results, the advanced spectroscopy techniques and theoretical calculations. The adsorption and the photocatalytic reduction of organic pollutants and the sorption/reduction of heavy metal ions are generally considered as the main methods to decrease the concentration of pollutants in the natural environment. This review highlights a new way for the real applications of novel nanomaterials in environmental pollution management, especially for the undergraduate students to understand the recent works in the elimination of different kinds of inorganic and organic chemicals in the natural environmental pollution management.

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Acknowledgments

This project was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research (DSR) at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, under Grant No. KEP-19-130-40. The National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFC1900105) was acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia

    Njud S. Alharbi, Tasawar Hayat, Samar Omar Rabah, Ahmed Alsaedi & Xiangke Wang

  2. School of Life Science, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312000, China

    Baowei Hu

  3. Department of Mathematics, Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Tasawar Hayat

  4. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China

    Li Zhuang

  5. State Key Laboratory of Radiation Medicine and Protection, School of Radiation Medicine and Protection, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Xiangke Wang

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  1. Njud S. Alharbi
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  2. Baowei Hu
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  6. Li Zhuang
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Correspondence to Baowei Hu or Xiangke Wang.

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Alharbi, N.S., Hu, B., Hayat, T. et al. Efficient elimination of environmental pollutants through sorption-reduction and photocatalytic degradation using nanomaterials. Front. Chem. Sci. Eng. 14, 1124–1135 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11705-020-1923-z

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