Preface

Industrial inflations and demographic expansions resulted in incessant pollution of water resources with hazardous chemicals and complex xenobiotic compounds that challenge environmental sustainability. With the high cost and high energy requirements, complex plant designs, less efficiency in recovery, the conventional wastewater treatment strategies fail to support a feasible large-scale process resulting in the release of untreated wastewater into the environment. These serious concerns must be addressed with a feasible and sustainable technology that can remediate contaminated wastewater with scope for reutilization and recycling. Over the past decade, the research in this field keeps producing new processes and techniques to overcome the deficiencies encountered in these technologies. Several innovative green technologies are being outlined to address these issues with environmental sustainability and wastewater treatment such as nano-sized membrane-based treatment strategies, microalgae-based pollution management, commercial-scale fuel cells, inverse fluidization technology, etc . However, commercial-scale feasibility and applicability of these technologies are still far from realization. The present book ‘Recent Trends and Innovations in Sustainable Wastewater Treatment Technologies’ aims to address all these issues by integrating the knowledge of innovation technologies that have been developed predominantly in the past decade and the available commercial-scale processes altogether to understand the path ahead in reaching sustainability and high efficiency in wastewater treatment.

The book has been compiled into eight chapters. Chapter 1 details the various types of prevailing wastewater, its characteristics, and the major commercial-scale strategies employed to treat those types of wastewater. Chapter 2 details predominantly the different types of physicochemical methods utilized for the remediation of heavy metals, dyes, and xenobiotics. Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the innovations in the advanced oxidation process and adsorption for remediation of such complex molecules respectively. Chapters 6, and 7 individually address the recent innovations in the bioremediation of heavy metals, and dyes respectively. Finally, chapters 8 and 9 discuss the latest technologies, prevailing bottlenecks, and the path ahead towards commercial viability and environmental sustainability in both physicochemical and biological treatment processes.

We are obliged to the authors for their contributions and to the reviewers for their comprehensive comments on shaping up the chapters and improving their quality.