Remediation of Soil and Groundwater Polluted by Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: A Review

摘要

Water and soil pollution due to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is a serious problem because of acute toxicities and carcinogenic nature of these pollutants. Several strategies have been applied to eliminate these dangerous pollutants from contaminated soil and groundwater. Among a variety of removing techniques, adsorption is the most popular and widely used. Adsorption has advantages over the other methods because of low price, simplicity of design, universal nature and ease of operation. Hence, this process meets the great attention from the researchers. This paper provides literature review about PAH, Emission sources and occurrence in the environment and PAH adsorption characteristics by various adsorbents such as activated carbon, bio-adsorbent, carbon nanotube, magnetic adsorbent, biochar and zeolite adsorbent. These adsorbents have been classified into seven different categories on the basis of their chemical nature. The results of this reviewed article showed that little attention has been paid to usage of novel adsorbents in PAH removal. Hence, few suggestions for future research are proposed.