Recent advances in wastewater treatment processes have resulted in high removal efficiencies for various hazardous pollutants. Nevertheless, some technologies are more suitable for targeting specific contaminants than others. We comprehensively reviewed the recent advances in removing hazardous pollutants from industrial wastewater through membrane technologies, adsorption, Fenton-based processes, advanced oxidation processes (AOP), and hybrid systems such as electrically-enhanced membrane bioreactors (eMBRs), and integrated eMBR-adsorption system. Each technology’s key features are compared, and recent modifications to the conventional treatment approaches and limitations of advanced treatment systems are highlighted. The removal of emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals from wastewater is also discussed.

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Groundwater remediation operation involves several considerations in terms of environmental, technological and socio-economic aspects. A decision support tool (DST) becomes therefore necessary in order to manage problem complexity and to define effective groundwater remediation interventions. CCR (Credence Clearwater Revival), a decision support tool for groundwater remediation technologies assessment and selection, has been developed to help decision-makers (site owners, investors, local community representatives, environmentalists, regulators, etc.) to assess the available technologies and select the preferred remedial options. The analysis is based on technical, economical, environmental and social criteria. These criteria are ranked by all involved parties to determine their relative importance for a particular groundwater remediation project. The Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is the core of the CCR using the PROMETHEE II algorithm.

The current paper assesses the potential of industrial solid wastes utilization such as blast furnace slag (BFS) and zeolite synthesized from fly ash (ZFA), which are effective as well as economically attractive for the uptake of phosphate and ammonium from polluted seawater. The solidification of BFS and ZFA has been developed in different proportions of BFS/ZFA (30/70, 50/50 and 70/30 (w/w)) with different porosities (25%, 40% and 52%, respectively) to cylindrical porous carriers using a Hydrothermal Hot-Pressing (HHP) method. The concentrations of heavy metals in ZFA and BFS were too low to affect the aquatic environment. The main finding is that the high rate of BFS (70%) in porous carriers enhanced phosphate uptake explained by the higher percentage of calcium (35.7%) in porous carriers and high pH conditions. The efficient ammonium uptake was observed with high rate of ZFA (70%) in porous carriers. Results found through this experimental work imply that porous carriers with BFS/ZFA proportion of 70/30 are suitable for potential practical application in the aquatic environment due to their efficient uptake of phosphate and ammonium. The choice was made upon their porosity (40%) and their compressive strength (56 kgf/cm2) which are relatively higher than those with BFS/ZFA proportion of 30/70 and 50/50.