Environmental risks and toxicity of surfactants: overview of analysis, assessment, and remediation techniques

Abstract

This work comprehensively reviewed the toxicity and risks of various surfactants and their degraded products in the environmental matrices, various analytical procedures, and remediation methods for these surfactants. The findings revealed that the elevated concentration of surfactants and their degraded products disrupt microbial dynamics and their important biogeochemical processes, hinder plant-surviving processes and their ecological niche, and retard the human organic and systemic functionalities. The enormous adverse effects of surfactants on health and the environment necessitate the need to develop, select, and advance the various analytical and assessment techniques to achieve effective identification and quantification of several surfactants in different environmental matrices. Considering the presence of surfactants in trace concentration and environmental matrices, excellent analysis can only be achieved with appropriate extraction, purification, and preconcentration. Despite these pre-treatment procedures, the chromatographic technique is the preferred analytical technique considering its advancement and shortcomings of other techniques. In the literature, the choice or selection of remediation techniques for surfactants depends largely on eco-friendliness, cost-implications, energy requirements, regeneration potential, and generated sludge composition and volume. Hence, the applications of foam fractionation, electrochemical advanced oxidation processes, thermophilic aerobic membranes reactors, and advanced adsorbents are impressive in the clean-up of the surfactants in the environment. This article presents a compendium of knowledge on environmental toxicity and risks, analytical techniques, and remediation methods of surfactants as a guide for policymakers and researchers.

Eco-friendly adsorbents based on abietic acid, boswellic acid, and chitosan/magnetite for removing waste oil from the surface of the water

“…Moreover the dispersants in nano-size dimensions have many characteristics. The dispersants remain in the water to disperse the oil into tiny droplets (Badmus et al 2021 ), but the adsorbents remove the oil droplets. Magnetite nanoparticles have been used in different applications such as drug delivery and medicine due to their unique properties; they have antimicrobial effects.…”

Electric Double Layer in Water-Organic Mixed Solvents: Titania in 50% Ethylene Glycol

“…For example (Sigma-Aldrich online catalogue, accessed 21 March 2022), 1 mole of NaOH (reagent grade, 1 kg jar) costs 1.6 euro, while 1 mole of SDS (reagent grade, 1 kg jar) costs 28 euro and 1 mole of CTMABr (reagent grade, 1 kg jar) costs 106 euro. Many papers have been published on the environmental risks related to surfactants ([ 22 ], and references therein).…”

How to simply and efficiently screen microbial strains capable of anaerobic biosynthesis of biosurfactants: Method establishment, influencing factors and application example evaluation

“…Biosurfactants exhibit excellent performance, great application potential and incomparable advantages against chemical surfactants (Badmus et al, 2021 ; Johnson et al, 2021 ). With increasing awareness of environmental protection, more and more attention has been paid to biosurfactants.…”

“…Biosurfactants are surface active secondary metabolites generally biosynthesized by some bacteria, yeast or fungi, including lipopeptides, glycolipids, phospholipids, long-chain hydroxyl fatty acid, glycoproteins and heteropolysaccharides (Fenibo et al, 2019 ; Markande et al, 2021 ). With the increasing awareness of environmental protection, more and more attention has been paid to microbial biosurfactants (Badmus et al, 2021 ). Compared with chemical surfactants, biosurfactants have the advantages of high activity, low toxicity or non-toxicity, biodegradability and ecological friendliness (Phulpoto et al, 2020 ).…”