Chapter 7 - Nanomaterials-based electroanalytical techniques for the identification of pollutants

Abstract

The rapid increase in industrialization over the last two decades resulted in polluting the environment, causing global warming, climatic changes, and serious health effects to entire life on this planet. The common pollutants responsible for environmental pollution are inorganic (heavy metals), organic, (dyes, drugs, antibiotics, pesticides, insecticides, and aromatic nitro compounds), and nuclear waste. This alarmed the various environmental protection agencies to reduce the pollution of the environment by taking necessary measures. The preliminary step in environmental pollution control is monitoring pollutants. For this, electroanalytical techniques are proved to be best among other available techniques. This is because of their cost-effectiveness, simple instrumentation, miniaturization, and field portability. However, it is necessary to trace the monitoring of analytes (pollutants) in nano/picomolar concentrations in complex environmental matrix. In order to achieve selectivity and sensitivity, electroanalytical techniques should couple with nanomaterials. The special structural and other features of nanomaterials like large surface areas, high surface energy, reactivity, better conductivities, good optical properties, and aspect ratios enable them to be special compared to their bulk counterparts. The use of nanomaterials (as electrode modifiers) along with electroanalytical techniques during the electrochemical analysis of pollutants increased the stability, sensitivity, and selectivity by several orders and enabled to monitor pollutants in complex environmental matrix with more accuracy. This chapter enumerates various electroanalytical techniques reported for environmental analysis using the nanomaterials as electrode modifiers, along with the challenges and future perspectives of these techniques.