Recent progress and challenges of adsorptive membranes for the removal of pollutants from wastewater. Part II: Environmental applications

Abstract Adsorptive membranes have attracted attention recently and have been employed to remove variety of pollutants from wastewater. Part I of this work was devoted to provide an overview on the latest progress in their fabrication techniques. This part is devoted to review the studies performed towards environmental applications. Adsorptive membranes were used to remove pollutants such as dyes, heavy metals, and pharmaceuticals. The major findings of this review include presenting the various benefits associated with the use of adsorptive membranes in micro-pollutants removal from water samples and discussing the potential utilization of bio-adsorbents such as chitosan. While adsorptive membranes proved their effectiveness in removing several pollutants, they still however, suffer from various drawbacks and challenges on a large scale implementation. These drawbacks include the low adsorption capacity, the cost, reusability and fouling. Finally, the paper concludes that exploiting adsorptive membranes in the removal of emerging pharmaceutical compounds in particular have not yet been researched extensively in the literature and more efforts should be focused in this direction.