Recent Progress in Adsorptive Removal of Water Pollutants by Metal‐Organic Frameworks

Abstract

Difficulty in accessing drinkable water resources, mostly originating from water pollution, has become a serious challenge for humans and the environment. Increasing population, growth of industrial activities, and the increasing demand for the agricultural sector have generated various pollutants into the environment, especially water resources. Thus, treatment of industrial effluents before discharging them into the environment is necessary to reduce the pollutants, maintain the quality of drinkable water, recycle wastewater sources to save water consumption, and minimize water resource supplied. Among the new materials applied for the adsorptive removal of pollutants from aquatic environments, metal‐organic frameworks have become a promising candidate to optimize wastewater treatment process. This is mainly due to their unique properties such as structural diversity, high specific surface area, and high adsorption capacity. This article aims to review the highlights and challenges of MOFs when are being used to remove heavy metals, dyes, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, pesticides, and herbicides from polluted water resources. The relationship between the properties of MOFs and their performance for adsorption of pollutants as well as the key mechanisms of adsorbing water pollutants using MOFs are presented. The use of water‐stable MOFs such as MOF‐235, MIL‐53, MIL‐100, MIL‐101, UiO‐66, ZIF‐67, and ZIF‐8 will be discussed for removing various pollutants. The adsorption efficiency of functionalized MOFs, magnetic MOFs, MOF‐polymer, graphene oxide‐MOF, and CNT‐MOF composites will be reviewed in comparison with commercial adsorbents such as zeolites and activated carbon. As for the conclusion, the challenges and outlooks of applying MOFs and MOF‐based materials for the adsorptive separation of water pollutants are summarized.

Recent Advances in MOF-Based Adsorbents for Dye Removal from the Aquatic Environment

“…Due to its excellent performances in various applications in different fields, it has been considered an essential member of new porous materials in recent years. MOFs present excellent performance in removing various contaminants from the gaseous and aqueous medium [38]. The most important advantages of MOF over other adsorbents are structural diversity [39], the possibility of determining the size of the pores, as well as determining the properties and performance by selecting various metal nodes and organic ligands in the synthesis stage.…”

Efficient adsorptive removal of paracetamol and thiazolyl blue from polluted water onto biosynthesized copper oxide nanoparticles

“…In most developing and wealthy countries, the lack of clean water has become a critical issue 1 . This is attributed to rapid technological advancement, industrial effluent pollution, the rapid growth of the human population, and erratic rainfall which degrades water quality 2 – 4 . Regular use of contemporary amenities and goods such as gasoline for cars, plastics, textile apparel, food products, and medications, to name a few has led to enormous waste product generation and contamination of previously unpolluted water basins 5 .…”

Metal-organic frameworks and plastic: an emerging synergic partnership

“…Metal-organic framework (MOFs), also called porous coordination polymers (PCPs), are a class of relatively new crystalline nano-porous materials, generated by the coordination of bidentate or multidentate organic ligands to metal ion cores or metal clusters [ 37–39 ]. Generally, MOFs have unique properties, such as strong coordination bonds, large and robustus porous structures and accessible surface areas, and high adsorption capacity, which make them suitable adsorbent materials for wastewater treatment, reaching high performances in particular for the removal of micropollutants [ 40–43 ]. All these features, along with the enhanced catalytic activity that they can display [ 44–46 ], provide an exciting opportunity to produce new advanced adsorbents for MPs/NPs removal from water and wastewater [ 47 ] as well as catalytic materials able to easily degrade MPs/NPs [ 48 ].…”