Recent advances on elemental biosorption

LETICIA B. ESCUDERO; PAMELA Y. QUINTAS; RODOLFO G. WUILLOUD; GUILHERME L. DOTTO

ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY LETTERS

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

Lugar: HEIDELBERG; Año: 2018 p. 1 - 19

1610-3653

Industrial activities play a relevant role in environmental pollution since their wastes contain high concentrations of toxic elements that can add significant contamination to natural water and other water sources if no decontamination is previously applied. As toxic metals and metalloids are not biodegradable and tend to accumulate in living organisms, it is necessary to treat the contaminated industrial wastewaters prior to their discharge into the water bodies. There are different remediation techniques that have been developed to solve elemental pollution, but biosorption has arisen as a promising clean?up and low?cost biotechnology. Biosorption is governed by a variety of mechanisms including chemical binding, ion exchange, physisorption, precipitation, and oxide-reduction. Biosorption involves operations that can be designed to minimize or avoid the use or generation of hazardous substances that have a negative impact on the environment and biota, thus following the concept of green chemistry. A successful biosorption process can be only developed based on multidisciplinary knowledge that includes physical chemistry, biochemistry and technology, among other fields.In this review, the state of the art applications of biosorbents for metals and metalloids removal are carefully revised based on a complete analysis of the literature. Thus, different type of biomaterials including bacteria, fungi, algae, plant?derivatives, agricultural wastes, and chitin?chitosan based materials are considered. Also, modern bio?nano?hybrids materials, which have superlative sorption properties due to their high surface area coming from the nano?materials structures and multifunctional capacity incorporated from the several types of chemical groups of biomaterials, are discussed. High metal removal percentages as high as 70 to 100% can be found in most works reported in the literature, which demostrates the excellent performance obtained with biosorbents. These, as well as other important aspects linked to biosorption are fully covered in the present review.