Preface

Waste management is one of the major challenges for environmental and public health worldwide. With the growing population and urbanization, it is increasing every day. These wastes contain various types of toxic pollutants of organic and inorganic nature, which disturb the ecosystem and pose adverse effects to humans and animals. The provision of pollution-free soil, air, and safe water is critical for a balanced ecosystem. Several treatment techniques, including physical, chemical, and biological, are used to remediate hazardous wastes, whereas bioremediation offers cost-effective and green technology for the abatement of toxic pollutants in the environment. However, there are lots of constraints and complexity in dealing with waste management. This book comprises eight chapters that focus on the waste source to its adverse impacts on the ecosystem, and the advanced strategies for their remediation along with associated challenges. The first two chapters explain microbe-assisted remediation technology to detoxify heavy metals and degrade xenobiotic compounds through various biosynthetic mechanisms, along with the significance of recent biotechnological methods in improving the capability of microbial remediation methods. The toxic pollutants are successfully degraded in microbe-assisted remediation along with phytoremediation. The challenges, future outlooks, and limitations are also discussed. Chapter 3 describes strategies including physical, chemical, and biological methods to mitigate radioactive waste from contaminated sites and water bodies. This chapter is focused on eco-friendly and economical solutions for global radioactive waste disposal problems and other associated challenges. Chapter 4 discusses biomedical waste, which is hazardous, and if left untreated, can cause serious health hazards. This chapter detailed the use of microbial-aided remediation techniques for the removal of biomedical waste. Chapter 5 explains the source of electronic waste, its impact on humans and animals, physicochemical and advanced microbiological methods for the management of e-waste, as well as challenges associated with this. Chapter 6 describes bioremediation strategies for the decontamination of solid waste pollutants. Chapter 7 focuses on the application of OMICs approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics in bioremediation. It plays a significant role in generating information about degradative enzymes and pathways involved in the remediation of pollutants by microorganisms. The last chapter describes the bioremediation of agricultural wastes.

The peculiarity of the book is that it does not only cover methods of bioremediation but also describes the challenges as well recent advancements in the bioremediation of different pollutants. This book would be beneficial to students of environmental sciences, including microbiology and biotechnology, environmental engineers, and researchers working for the restoration of contaminated sites.