“…As a low-cost substitute of activated carbon, biochar can be used as carbon sequestration and soil amendment (Carey et al, 2015;Agegnehu et al, 2017). Besides, biochar is recently used as a green environmental sorbent to remove diverse organic contaminants such as aromatic dyes, antibiotics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and agrochemicals from aqueous and gaseous phases (Qiu et al, 2009;Beesley et al, 2010;Zheng et al, 2010;Teixido et al, 2011;Xu et al, 2011;Saleh et al, 2016;De Jesus et al, 2017), or inorganic contaminants such as heavy metals and various nutritional elements (NH 4 + , NO 3 and PO 4 -3 ) from urban and industrial wastewaters and agricultural drainage water (Fang et al, 2014;Saleh et al, 2012;Saleh et al, 2013;Hafshejani et al, 2016;Cai et al, 2017;Strock et al, 2017). Biochar has been recently used to improve agricultural ecosystems and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (Ulyett et al, 2014;Tan et al, 2017).…”