Heavy metals are increasingly present in industrial wastes and effluents,which can generate serious concerns for environmental quality andhuman health. Consequently, there is a continuous expansion ofresearches for new approaches and developments to guaranteeenvironmental cleaning-up. Although there are some physico-chemicalestablished methods for the removal of heavy metals from variousenvironmental compartments, biosorption gains further confidence as areliable alternative compared to classical technologies, which areexpensive and sometimes unreliable. This paper aims to analyze thebiosorption as a biotechnological strategy for the decontamination ofaqueous effluents containing heavy metal ions, in terms of its potentialfor metal immobilization and uptake. The paper also focuses on the mostimportant parameters affecting the removal of heavy metals by variouscategories of biosorbents both living and non-living forms of biomass and provides new alternatives for modeling and optimization ofprocess equilibrium and kinetics. A special attention was paid tobiosorption mechanism, as a factual challenge for process optimizationand scale-up. The potential benefits and problems associated to metalremoval by biosorption are highlighted.
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