Nanomaterials: An alternative source for biodegradation of toxic dyes

Abstract

Environment contamination is a colossal worriment across the world, owing to its detrimental and negative impact on health and ecological systems. Dyes are one of the synthetic organic chemicals that are utilised in a variety of fields, including textiles. As a result, throughout one's production and subsequently in fibre colouring, these are becoming frequent industry-contributed contaminants. Increasing globalisation of international market has presented a problem to textile sector in terms of consistency and production. Textile processors' primary concern, as the highly competitive environment and environmental standards grow more severe is about being mindful of the grade of goods and even non-toxicity of their production processes. There seems to be an immediate necessity to look for methods and technologies which are useful in removing dye colours. Even though each has benefits and weaknesses, many physical, chemical, and biological approaches were explored and used with the application being dependent on the effluent properties, technical feasibility, and cost. Several remediation technologies are already developed, but they seem to be ineffective at removing dyes completely. There is a fast growth of nanoparticles applications in the past few years which has opened up newer, innovating, highly efficient, and low-cost dyes remediation systems. Nanomaterials with large surface areas change surface characteristics and distinctive electron conducting capabilities which make them ideal candidate for the treatment of wastewater that contains dyes. In this review, we have highlighted not only the role of nanotechnology in dye remediation processes but also different types of nanomaterials that can be used for the remediation of dyes.