Sustainable Processes for the Removal of Heavy Metals from Aquatic Systems

Water pollution is a global problem threatening the entire biosphere and affecting the life of many millions of people. It is not only one of the foremost global risk factors for illness, diseases and death, as it also contributes to the continuous reduction of the available drinkable water sources worldwide. Delivering valuable solutions, which are easy to implement and affordable, often remains a challenge.
Heavy metal ions are some of the most harmful and widespread contaminants, with adverse effects to the environment. Actually, they are one of deadly contaminants in ground water across the globe. Biosorption of heavy metals by metabolically inactive non-living biomass of microbial or plant origin is an innovative and alternative technology for removal of these pollutants from aqueous solution.
This Special Issue attempts to summarize the state-of-the-art of current macro-, micro- and nanotechnologies for water purification, discussing their field of application specially for heavy metal ion removal.
For instance this Special Issue aims to present the recently available information on utilizing different biomass materials for heavy metals removal, highlighting the increasing use of these materials due to their low cost, regeneration ability, high adsorption efficiency, and small chemical or biological sludge with a possibility of metal recovery.
Furthermore, the selected contributions will be considered from the technology used in each case, and in the context of their sustainability. One important purpose of this Special Issue is to ensure the possible implementation in real applications of technologic tools developed under interesting research funded projects. So, this Special Issue will mainly focus on sustainable efficient approaches, that provide innovation and ease to implementation.