Resource Recovery from Complex Wastewaters: Materials, Technologies, and Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

Transitioning towards a green and circular economy necessitates a paradigm shift from wastewater treatment to resource recovery. A key priority is the development of sustainable, energy-efficient, and highly selective technologies capable of mining high-value and critical elements from complex wastewater and brine. Such target resources encompass a wide range of valuable components, including, but not limited to, critical minerals (e.g., lithium, iodine, bromine, and rare earth elements) from unconventional produced water or salt lake brines, precious and heavy metals from industrial effluents, and essential nutrients (e.g., phosphorus and nitrogen) from municipal wastewater. This Special Issue highlights cutting-edge developments in green separation materials, novel processes, and integrated strategies. We invite contributions focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Innovative Process Engineering: Novel designs for efficient resource extraction;
• Advanced Separation Materials: Next-generation adsorbents, membranes, and media for selective recovery;
• Sustainability and Economics: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) of recovery systems;
• Electrochemical technologies for resource separation and recovery;
• System Integration: Synergistic coupling of multiple technologies or unit operations;
• Unconventional Sources: Recovery of value-added components from unconventional oil and gas produced water (this refers to the highly saline and complex wastewater generated during the extraction of resources like shale gas, tight oil, and coalbed methane via technologies such as directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing).

Dr. Zhaoji Zhang
Guest Editor

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