Recent trends and future perspectives in applications of biofiltration

Abstract

The rapidly increasing industrialization has adversely affected the environment due to deterioration of water and air quality. The continuous addition of hazardous chemicals, gaseous contaminants, and particulate materials to our environment imposed the life-threatening challenges for flora and fauna. There is an urgent need to adopt the sustainable technologies to reduce the contamination occurring in air and water resources. To cope up with various types of contaminants abatement techniques have been employed. In the recent decade the biofiltration-based methods have been emerged as promising abatement techniques to remove the hazardous contaminants from wastewater or polluted air. The biofiltration exploits the potentials of microbial systems (bacteria and fungi) to degrade the wide range of chemicals and volatile organic components (VOCs). In this chapter emphasis has been given on the basic concepts and mechanism of biofiltration along with its application for treatment of wastewater and polluted air. The details about the removals of hazardous heavy metals, cationic-anionic dyes, xenobiotics, organic contaminants, and assimilable organic carbon from water has been discussed. The removal of VOC, malodorous compounds, and sulfurous compound from air have been discussed. The chapter also gives the light about pros and cons of biofiltration. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.