In this century, the biggest environmental concern is the pollution caused
due to the contamination of various industrial discharges. The majority of the liquid
discharges contain hazardous and various toxic non-degradable components, which are
carcinogenic and cause health hazards. The industrial effluent containing waste dyes,
pesticides and pharmaceuticals wastes are the major concern as these wastes bear a
substantial quantity of hazardous organic components. Therefore, the relevant
processing technologies are warranted to mitigate such issues. In the past four decades,
there has been an abundant investigation for adsorptive removal of these waste dyes
and other organic pollutants using numerous sorbents, including charcoal, activated
carbon, clay materials, organic extracts of the plants, nano-materials and many others.
However, with the development of various activated carbon in due course of time with
the perspective of process economy and effective adsorption behavior for removing
these organic pollutants, there has been a tremendous focus and growing interest for
their utilization in this domain. The sources of waste pollutants, development of
activated adsorbents, fundamental characteristics properties of the adsorbent, sorption
studies on removal of these adsorbent, sorption mechanism including sorption kinetics,
isotherm and thermodynamics on the interaction of activated adsorbent with organic
pollutant and future perspective are comprehensively discussed and reported.
Keywords: Activated Sorbent, Isotherm, Kinetics, Organic pollutants, Sorption,
Thermodynamics.
