Air Pollutants Removal Using Biofiltration Technique: A Challenge at the Frontiers of Sustainable Environment

Abstract

Air pollution is a central problem faced by industries during the production process. The control of this pollution is essential for the environment and living organisms as it creates harmful effects. Biofiltration is a current pollution management strategy that concerns removing odor, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and other pollutants from the air. Recently, this approach has earned vogue globally due to its low-cost and straightforward technique, effortless function, high reduction efficacy, less energy necessity, and residual consequences not needing additional remedy. There is a critical requirement to consider sustainable machinery to decrease the pollutants arising within air and water sources. For managing these different kinds of pollutant reductions, biofiltration techniques have been utilized. The contaminants are adsorbed upon the medium exterior and are metabolized to benign outcomes through immobilized microbes. Biofiltration-based designs have appeared advantageous in terminating dangerous pollutants from wastewater or contaminated air in recent years. Biofiltration uses the possibilities of microbial approaches (bacteria and fungi) to lessen the broad range of compounds and VOCs. In this review, we have discussed a general introduction based on biofiltration and the classification of air pollutants based on different sources. The history of biofiltration and other mechanisms used in biofiltration techniques have been discussed. Further, the crucial factors of biofilters that affect the performance of biofiltration techniques have been discussed in detail. Finally, we concluded the topic with current challenges and future prospects.

Soil Fungi Resistant to Organic Pollutants as a Potential Solution for Air Biofiltration

“…Gospodarek and coworkers [7] reviewed the literature published on some VOCs biofiltration techniques and show the successful elimination, for example, of styrene, acetone, trichloroethane, hexane, alpha-pinene and toluene with fungi grown on inert packing materials such as perlite. In recent years, biofiltration using fungi became attractive [9,10]. Comparing to bacteria, fungi are more resistant to low humidity [32,33] and increased temperature variation [2,32,33].…”

“…However, it is generally considered that such methods cannot be applied in all circumstances and, even more, are expensive and not always efficient [8]. For this reason, biological processes of cleaning hydrocarbon pollutants have been tested, either for mitigating the soil pollution, cleaning up the effluents resulted from industrial activities or for filtering the contaminated air [7,9,10]. Natural processes and the derived ones were involved in studies for bioremediation of organic pollutants of all the kinds.…”

Deodorisation of Ventilated Air from a Fat-Processing Plant Using Different Types of Biofilter Fillings and Membranes

“…The filter particles are typically soil, plastic material, compost, peat, granular activated carbon, wood chips, tree bark, lava rock, and heather [31]. Biofiltration uses bacteria and fungi to minimise the concentration of the broad range of compounds and VOCs-most published studies have focused on the removal of toluene, ethanol, propanol, and n-hexane [24,[32][33][34].…”

Current Trends and Future Perspectives in the Remediation of Polluted Water, Soil and Air—A Review

“…Primary pollutants are directly released into the environment from point or diffuse sources. Secondary pollutants are emitted as by-products of primary pollutants [3,9,10]. Pollutants are most often classified as chemical, physical and biological, as shown in Figure 1.…”