Environmental problems of great complexity arise from the enormous number of toxic substances that are generated by anthropogenic activities. Seemingly, society encounters new issues every day thus these problems seem to be endless. Now in the face of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the SARS‐CoV‐2 crisis, a large number of emerging treatment compounds generated by pharmaceutical companies worldwide makes future issues even more treacherous. For this reason, there is an increasing need to detect and treat emerging compounds to prevent them from becoming persistent pollutants. This review describes the advances in the use of electrochemical sensors with modified carbon‐based electrodes among other issues, to determine antibiotics, anti‐inflammatories and antidepressants levels in the environment. It further explores technologies suggested for cleaning wastewater polluted by pharmaceutical products using biological or advanced oxidation processes including photolysis, photocatalysis, microwave heating, ultrasound, Fenton, electro‐Fenton, photoelectro‐Fenton and various combined treatments.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.