Many untreated and partly treated wastewater from the home and commercial resources is being discharged into the aquatic environment these days, which contains numerous unknown and complex natural and inorganic compounds. These compounds tend to persist, initiating severe environmental problems, which affect human health. Conventionally, physicochemical treatment methods were adopted to remove such complex organic chemicals, but they suffer from critical limitations. Over time, photocatalysis, an advanced oxidation process, has gained its position for its efficient and fair performance against emerging organic pollutant decontamination. Typically, photocatalysis is a green technology to decompose organics under UV/visible light at ambient conditions. Semiconducting nanometal oxides have emerged as pioneering photocatalysts because of large active surface sites, flexible oxidation states, various morphologies, and easy preparation. The current review presents an overview of emerging organic pollutants and their effects, advanced oxidation processes, photocatalytic mechanism, types of photocatalysts, photocatalyst support materials, and methods for improving photodegradation efficiency on the degradation of complex emerging organic pollutants. In addition, the recent reports of metal-oxide-driven photocatalytic remediation of emerging organic pollutants are presented in brief. This review is anticipated to reach a broader scientific community to understand the first principles of photocatalysis and review the recent advancements in this field.
Keywords: Emerging organic pollutants; Metal-oxide semiconductors; Photocatalysis; Photodegradation; Synthesis and characterization.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.