Clean-green technologies for removal of emerging contaminants from industrial effluents

Abstract The ever-increasing socio-economic awareness and scientific knowledge along with growing industrial and technological advancements all have made the living society concern about the widespread distribution of emerging contaminants (ECs). Numerous anthropogenic inputs (human-made activities) are contaminating different environmental matrices at a continuous pace. The ongoing industrial practices are generating huge amount of environmentally related polluting agents along with toxic heavy elements, which are being released intentionally and/or unintentionally either into different water bodies or directly into the atmosphere. These include but not limited to the organic compounds, endocrine disruptors (EDs), for example, estrone, 17b-estradiol, and 17α-ethinylestradiol, pesticides or insecticides, bioactive residues from pharmaceuticals, and synthetic dyes or dyes-containing waste effluents. Such a wide-spread distribution and existence of above-mentioned ECs seriously threatening the living environment and pose notable adverse effects on human, aquatic animals, and naturally occurring plants. Despite the issue still exists, thanks to key scientific advances, new highly efficient and clean-green technologies are being developed to tackle this high concern global issue of environmental contamination. Owing to the inefficiencies of in practice chemical and physical removal methods, robust methods based on biological-based approaches, such as microorganisms and their novel enzyme-based degradation/removal of ECs are of supreme interest. This chapter focuses on various pollutants of emerging concern and their efficient removal/degradation. Following a brief comparison between conventional or traditional technologies and green technologies, the focus is given to two main treatment approaches, that is, (1) immobilized enzyme-based bio-catalytic cues as an effective way to tackle ECs and (2) bacterial-assisted degradation of ECs.