Natural and Natural-Based Polymers: Recent Developments in Management of Emerging Pollutants

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities lead to the issue of new classes of pollutants in the environment that are not currently monitored in environmental studies. This category of pollutants (known as emerging contaminants) includes a very wide range of target substances, such as pharmaceuticals, plant protection products, personal care products, dyes, toxins, microplastics and many other industrially important intermediaries. Together with an increasing demand for clean water (both for agricultural necessities and for the increasing population consumption), the need for the removal of emerging pollutants, simultaneously with the current “green chemistry” approach, opens the door for the industrial application of natural polymers in the area of environmental protection. Recent developments in this area are presented in this paper, as well as the application of these particular natural materials for the removal of other contaminants of interest (such as radioisotopes and nanoparticles). The current knowledge regarding the processes’ kinetics is briefly presented, as well as the future development perspectives in this area.

Insights into Recent Advances of Biomaterials Based on Microbial Biomass and Natural Polymers for Sustainable Removal of Pharmaceuticals Residues

“…Recent reviews mention the use of adsorption/biosorption processes for the removal of emergent contaminants from water and wastewater [10,11,21,37,38], but they are not focused on microbial biomass, its potential for drug removal, or the benefits and drawbacks of its use. Biosorption has emerged as a technology with considerable potential for the removal of these compounds from aqueous matrices in recent years, necessitating a linkage of information on biomaterials and the biosorption processes in which they might be used.…”

“…The biosorptive capacities of different types of biomass have been reported in thousands of research papers and quantitatively compared in many reviews, from which it is evident that they can vary considerably and depend to a large extent on the experimental conditions and possible pretreatments applied [10,11,21,37,41,42,55,60]. The selection of the most promising biosorbents from a wide range of affordable and easily accessible biomaterials has been and continues to be the key problem.…”

“…Biomass action is influenced not just by its chemical composition but also by external physico-chemical variables. Chelation, complexation, adsorption, ion exchange, degradation, electrostatic interaction, microprecipitation, coordination, and donor-acceptor interaction are frequently cited as mechanisms for micropollutant removal utilizing biomass [10,11,21,38,41]. Different types of microorganisms and residual microbial biomass have been used in the removal of pharmaceutical compounds by biosorption or biodegradation (Table 3).…”

“…This issue, together with rising energy usage, has prompted the development of novel technology for producing drinking water with little energy consumption. As a result, one of the primary global issues today is the development of innovative, environmentally friendly, low-cost, and high-efficiency water treatment technologies [5,9,10]. The negative impacts of organic and inorganic pollutants (dyes, pharmaceuticals, toxic metals, metalloids, radionuclides, etc.)…”

Dye-Doped Polymeric Microplastics: Light Tools for Bioimaging in Test Organisms

“…In the past five years, studies on the environmental impact of these microplastic materials have been carried out, in which suitably selected and prepared particles were studied to verify their toxicity and ecotoxicity to plants and animals [ 28 , 29 , 30 ]. In this way it has been possible to reproduce in laboratory tests the impact that nano- and microplastics can have on plants and animals, tracing them through the presence of fluorescent dopants [ 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ].…”