Environmental Contamination with Emerging Contaminants; Associated Health Risks and Remediation Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

The development of consumable products containing different elemental proportions is likely to rapidly expand in the immediate future. At present, such products are disposed of in the environment, with minimum or no consideration of their potential environmental risks. These consumable products are directly responsible for the release of both conventional and emerging contaminants. Emerging pollutants have been identified as a universal environmental issue, due to their severe toxicity for surrounding communities.

Emerging contaminants include but are not limited to suspended metal(loid)s such as sub-micron particulates associated with organic and inorganic materials, micro- and nano-plastics, nanomaterials including fertilizers and pesticides, PFASs, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetic products, and illicit drugs. Most of these pollutants are discharged into the environment, without consideration of their adverse effects on the environment. Indeed, many of these contaminants can still exert toxic effects even at trace levels, and their environmental occurrence might still be hard to detect. This is even more challenging when analytical measurements of such contaminants in real environmental conditions are difficult to achieve, due to several interferences. To date, the fate, transport, and toxicity of emerging contaminants remain unclear, reflecting more challenges in their remediation.

The lack of such advanced studies prompted this Special Issue to systematically assess the human health and ecological risks brought by various emerging contaminants, detected in both soil, air, and water environments. Moreover, the processes and technologies used to remediate these contaminates are still not fully developed. Therefore, there is a pressing need to understand the environmental behavior, toxicity, and developments in remediation technologies, to control the health and ecological risks of these pollutants. This Special Issue will present some of the study efforts in the aforementioned fields.

The specific topics of the Special Issue are:

• Analytical techniques of emerging environmental pollutants;
• Contaminant fate and transport;
• Risk assessment and management of the pollutants;
• Environmental remediation process and technologies;
• Natural attenuation of environmental pollution;
• Sustainable tools for new emerging wastewater treatment;
• Related fields.

Dr. Ezzat R. Marzouk
Dr. Amro Hassanein
Dr. Waleed Hares Shetaya
Guest Editors

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