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Natural and Natural-Based Polymers: Recent Developments in Management of Emerging Pollutants
Summary
This review explores how natural and bio-based polymers can be used to remove a range of emerging pollutants from water, including microplastics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides. It highlights natural materials as sustainable, cost-effective alternatives to synthetic adsorbents and aligns with green chemistry principles. The work is relevant to microplastics in that it frames them as part of a broader emerging contaminant problem and explores biopolymer-based solutions for water purification.
Anthropogenic activities lead to the issue of new classes of pollutants in the environment that are not currently monitored in environmental studies. This category of pollutants (known as emerging contaminants) includes a very wide range of target substances, such as pharmaceuticals, plant protection products, personal care products, dyes, toxins, microplastics and many other industrially important intermediaries. Together with an increasing demand for clean water (both for agricultural necessities and for the increasing population consumption), the need for the removal of emerging pollutants, simultaneously with the current "green chemistry" approach, opens the door for the industrial application of natural polymers in the area of environmental protection. Recent developments in this area are presented in this paper, as well as the application of these particular natural materials for the removal of other contaminants of interest (such as radioisotopes and nanoparticles). The current knowledge regarding the processes' kinetics is briefly presented, as well as the future development perspectives in this area.