Water pollutants are an emerging environmental hurdle for crop production and human health risks. In recent decades, the removal of contaminants from water using a cutting-edge approach like biosorbents is a strategy that is both cost-efficient and sustainable. For instance, since biowaste from fruit crops implies the frequent occurrence of average annual waste, it is imperative to formulate strategic initiatives to mitigate this emerging problem while simultaneously recognizing the potential for reutilization and reintroduction of such waste into the industrial sector. Fruit crops such as peels, seeds, skins, branches and stalks can be altered into biosorbents for water treatment. Partially mitigating the adverse impacts of biowaste that estimate to incur costs of billions of dollars around the world would be achieved with this engineering application. This review provides a perspective on the existing literature and brings up-to-date information and findings in the field of pomological crop waste as biosorbents for environmental remediation. In this way, we review the detrimental impact of environmental contaminants on biological organisms and different types of fruit crop waste and their utilization for wastewater treatment, with special emphasis on the formulation of biowaste sorbents (removal efficiency is > 80%) and their application for capturing pollutants such as heavy metals, organic and inorganic dyes and oils. Besides, the newly invented techniques for the characterization of fruit-based biosorbents, the parametric evaluation of biosorbents and their comparison with other available biosorbents are discussed. This review will be helpful for remediating contaminants in wastewater and a panacea for practical engineering solutions.
Keywords: Bio-based sorbents; Contaminated water; Fruit crop waste; Sustainable solution; Wastewater treatment.
© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.