Abstract
The pollution of soil is a worldwide concern as it has harmful consequences on the environment and human health. With the continuous expansion of industry and agriculture, the content of hydrophobic organic pollutants in the soil has been increasing, which has caused serious pollution to the soil. The removal of hydrophobic organic contaminants from soil, aiming to recover environmental safety, is an urgent matter to guarantee sufficient food and water for populations. Adsorption has proven to be an effective and economically practicable method for removing organic contaminants. This paper summarizes the use of low-cost adsorbents, such as biochar and activated carbon, for removing hydrophobic organic contaminants from soil. Biochar is usually appropriate for the adsorption of organic contaminants via the adsorption mechanisms of electrostatic interaction, precipitation, and ion exchange. Biochar also has numerous benefits, such as being obtained from several kinds of raw materials, having low costs, recyclability, and potential for environmental treatment. This paper illustrates biochar’s adsorption mechanism for organic contaminants and discusses the microbial degradation of hydrophobic organic contaminants.
Highlights
Environmental pollution has become a worldwide concern
Of the processes used for the removal of Hydrophobic organic contaminates (HOCs) from soil, adsorption is the most useful because it is very simple in terms of operation, has low costs, requires little maintenance, and does not lead to the undesirable formation of by-products [58]
HOCs are poorly soluble in water and strongly adsorb on solids, adsorption is a choice technique [51,52,53,57,59,60] that is very efficient for the removal of HOCs from soil
Summary
Environmental pollution has become a worldwide concern. Both developing countries and developed nations are affected by environmental pollution and suffer the consequences. The use of physical, thermal, chemical, phytoremediation, and biological processes (including total oxidation, radio frequency heating, oxidation, desorption by heat, photolysis, electrolysis, adsorption, ion exchange, natural attenuation, precipitation, bioaugmentation, biostimulation, phytoextraction, phytodegradation, and phytostabilization procedures) is an adequate method to remove HOCs from contaminated soil, sediments, and waters [40,41,42,43,44,45]. Most of these techniques have disadvantages, such as high maintenance and investment costs and complicated operating procedures. Numerous studies have been conducted to find the most economic and effective sorption media and to determine the factors that affect HOC removal [41,51,52,53,54,55,56,57]
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