Carbon-based sustainable nanomaterials for waste water treatment: A review

Abstract

The supply of safe and clean drinking water to meet the needs of the ever increasing population of the world is becoming a challenging task. Due to various human activities such as industrialization, agricultural activities using fertilizers and pesticides etc, available water is getting polluted. This waste water needs to be treated/purified for human use in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. For this, the right choice is carbon based nanoparticles. Carbon nanomaterials such as activated carbon, single-walled, multi-walled carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphene oxide-based nanomaterials, carbon and graphene quantum dots-derived nanomaterials have been developed and applied as adsorbents for wastewater treatment and purification. This review focusses on carbonaceous nanomaterials as novel sustainable sorbents that are deployed for the elimination of contaminants and ionic metals from aqueous media. Further, it also focuses on comparison of various carbon nanoparticles as far as pollutants adsorption in waste water treatment, cost, ease of production etc. are concerned.