Recent Strategies for Environmental Remediation of Organochlorine Pesticides

Abstract

The amount of organochlorine pesticides in soil and water continues to increase; their presence has surpassed maximum acceptable concentrations. Thus, the development of different removal strategies has stimulated a new research drive in environmental remediation. Different techniques such as adsorption, bioremediation, phytoremediation and ozonation have been explored. These techniques aim at either degrading or removal of the organochlorine pesticides from the environment but have different drawbacks. Heterogeneous photocatalysis is a relatively new technique that has become popular due to its ability to completely degrade different toxic pollutants—instead of transferring them from one medium to another. The process is driven by a renewable energy source, and semiconductor nanomaterials are used to construct the light energy harvesting assemblies due to their rich surface states, large surface areas and different morphologies compared to their corresponding bulk materials. These make it a green alternative that is cost-effective for organochlorine pesticides degradation. This has also opened up new ways to utilize semiconductors and solar energy for environmental remediation. Herein, the focus of this review is on environmental remediation of organochlorine pesticides, the different techniques of their removal from the environment, the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques and the use of specific semiconductors as photocatalysts.

Bioremediation of Agricultural Soils Polluted with Pesticides: A Review

“…Pesticide diffusion in the environment [13,14] Toxic effects on living organisms [13,15,16] Legislation [14] Physical techniques for pesticide degradation [17,18] Chemical techniques for pesticide degradation [16][17][18] Biological techniques for pesticide degradation [17][18][19][20][21][22] Microorganisms capable of degrading pesticides [13,19,[21][22][23] Enzymatic degradation [24] Economic analysis [17] Degradation of organochlorine pesticides [14,16] Degradation of herbicides.…”

Effect of Non-indigenous Bacterial Introductions on Rhizosphere Microbial Community

“…Different remediation approaches have been utilized to different environmental contaminants. Apparently, among those methods, cost effectiveness is one of the primary factors of consideration for application, which could be provided by various microorganisms in the process known as bioremediation [7][8][9][10]. Furthermore, utilization of these microorganisms, such as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), also encourages reduction of reliance to chemical fertilizers and pesticides by improving the acquisition of nutrients from soil, releasing of plant hormone regulators, protecting the roots from pathogens, and improving plant stress tolerance [11,12].…”

Adoption Level of Good Aquaculture Practices in Brackish Water Pond Aquaculture, Pinrang Regency, South Sulawesi Province

“…The study carried out in 2005 by Mustafa and Ratnawati (2007) showed that pond farmers in Pinrang Regency included those in Lanrisang and Mattiro Sompe Subdistricts, still used inorganic pesticides that contained Endosulfan, Metidation, and Sipermetrin during pond preparation and Deltamethrin during culture. All inorganic pesticides are potentially toxic to all sorts of life and some are even classified as probable human carcinogens, neutrotoxics, and endocrine system disruptors (Malhat et al, 2018;Ajiboye et al, 2020). The government has prohibited the use of pesticide containing those active compounds in brackish water ponds for their high toxicity, their characteristics that are difficult to be degraded might accumulate in pond soil and have a high potential to be accumulated in the tissue of the organism.…”

“…The use of fertilizer and lime in brackish water ponds is expected to have no negative impact on environment. So far, the environmental problems due to the use of fertilizer and lime have not yet been found in Asia (Phillips, 2000;Hossain et al, 2013) and in the world (Ajiboye et al, 2020).…”