Recent advances on heterojunction-based photocatalysts for the degradation of persistent organic pollutants

Abstract Photocatalysis has attracted a broad range of attention because of its ability of efficient solar energy utilization for environmental governance. Hence, abundant photocatalysts have been investigated continuously to meet the requirement of energy-supply issues. However, engineering photocatalysts with strong visible light-harvesting ability, efficient charge separation, and superior stability is imminently desired due to the low efficiency of photocatalytic reactions with an individual photocatalyst. Particularly the fabrication of heterostructured photocatalysts have conquered the aforementioned bottlenecks and displayed great potential in the field of contaminants degradation. Herein, we summarized the recent significant progress on the design of different heterostructured photocatalysts and their wide applications in persistent organic pollutants (POPs) degradation is highlighted. We firstly introduce the representative synthetic tactics, the charge transfer mechanism, and the categories. Thereafter we outline state-of-the-art heterostructured photocatalysts for the degradation of different types of POPs, in which the improvement of primary focus on the reason why the photocatalytic activity was high. Additionally, we proposed the ongoing challenges and perspectives of heterojunction photocatalytic systems.