review · RSC Advances
Industrial wastewater treatment requires effective and low-cost solutions to remove pollutants and reduce freshwater consumption. Coagulation and flocculation offer a straightforward method for capturing colloidal particles as well as organic and inorganic contaminants. Although natural coagulants and flocculants are biodegradable, effective, and environmentally friendly, their commercial use remains limited. Recent evaluations show that expanding beyond traditional plant-based sources, such as seeds, tannins, and fruit peels, provides new opportunities for effluent decontamination. Key preparation methods can improve the physical stability of these bio-based materials, enabling them to compete with conventional chemical options. Furthermore, the development of magnetic natural coagulants and flocculants demonstrates strong performance across varied industrial effluents. These magnetic variants also present viable pathways for recovering and reprocessing spent materials, alongside conceptual designs for large-scale industrial treatment installations.
Conventional chemical wastewater treatments often introduce persistent synthetic residues into the environment. Transitioning to stable, naturally sourced coagulants allows industries to treat heavy effluent sustainably and safely. Advances in magnetic bio-based materials also open routes to recycling treatment residues, thereby reducing operational waste and supporting circular water management practices across manufacturing sectors.
The reviewed technology targets industrial plant operators and wastewater treatment facilities seeking biodegradable alternatives to synthetic coagulants. While lab-scale validation is established for diverse bio-sources, overall deployment appears to be at an applied design stage, moving toward large-scale implementation through proposed magnetic treatment systems and material recovery processes that require full pilot validation.
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Industrial wastewater is categorized as a voracious consumer of fresh water and a high-strength source of pollution. Coagulation-flocculation is a simple and cost-effective technique for removing organic/inorganic compounds and colloidal particles from industrial effluents. Despite the outstanding natural properties, biodegradability, and efficacy of natural coagulants/flocculants (NC/Fs) in industrial wastewater treatment, their significant potential to remediate such effluents is underappreciated, particularly in commercial scale applications. Most reviews on NC/Fs focused on the possible application of plant-based sources such as plant seeds, tannin, certain vegetables/fruit peels, and their lab-scale potential. Our review expands the scope by examining the feasibility of using natural materials from other sources for industrial effluent decontamination. By analyzing the latest data on NC/Fs, we identify the most promising preparation techniques for making these materials stable enough to compete with traditional options in the marketplace. An interesting presentation of the results of various recent studies has also been highlighted and discussed. Additionally, we highlight the recent success of using magnetic-natural coagulants/flocculants (M-NC/Fs) in treating diverse industrial effluents, and discuss the potential for reprocessing spent materials as a renewable resource. The review also offers different concepts for suggested large-scale treatment systems used by MN-CFs.
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DOI: 10.1039/d3ra01999c
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