Advances in Heavy Metal Recovery Technologies from Wastewater: Biosorption, Hybrid Systems and Crucial Economy

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-756-9_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Resource recovery; Heavy metals; Wastewater; Circular economy; Hybrid technologies

Abstract

Metallic pollutants released from industry into aquatic environment has become a concern that progressively pollutes ecosystems and poses a risk to public health due to their toxicity, persistence nature, and non-biodegradability. Traditional wastewater treatment techniques essentially targets on contaminant elimination often overlooking the likely recovery of precious metals as secondary resources. In line with circular economy criterion, this review critically evaluates current advances in heavy metal recovery approaches, emphasizing the shift from pollutant removal to green resource recovery. Conventional physicochemical approaches, including ion exchange, chemical precipitation, membrane filtration, adsorption, and electrochemical processes, are checked in relation to their recovery potential, scalability, selectivity and practicable limitations. Emphasis is given to biosorption and other bio-based recovery methods owing to their low cost, environmental compatibility, regeneration efficiency, and applicability for recovering metals from dilute waste streams. In order to improve metal selectivity and recovery efficiency in complex wastewater system, emerging hybrid methods that integrate adsorption, membrane separation, electrochemical recovery, and biological processes are explored. The review further focuses on present day advancement in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence-assisted process optimization, and digital monitoring for remodelling performance and industrial scalability. Analysis centres around key challenges, which includes selective adsorption in multimetal process, electrode passivation and fouling of membrane. It also addresses techno-economic feasibility, material regeneration and the absence of standardized quality protocols for recovered metals. This review offers a thorough prespective of integrated heavy metal recovery techniques and their contribution to the advancement of circular wastewater management and environmental sustainability.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Prajakta Magdum
AU  - Abha Chavan
AU  - Nilisha Itankar
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/31
TI  - Advances in Heavy Metal Recovery Technologies from Wastewater: Biosorption, Hybrid Systems and Crucial Economy
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference on Bioengineering for Global Health (SYMRESEARCH 2.0 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 216
EP  - 240
SN  - 2468-5747
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-756-9_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-756-9_16
ID  - Magdum2026
ER  -