Unveiling the Potential of Biogenic Nanoparticles for Wastewater Remediation: A Systematic Review
Abstract
In recent decades, escalating water pollution driven by demographic growth, industrial development, agricultural intensification, and rapid urban expansion has emerged as a critical global environmental challenge. Contamination of water bodies by heavy metals, organic compounds, and pathogenic microorganisms has intensified the need for sustainable wastewater remediation strategies. This review elucidates the mechanistic potential and strategies for wastewater remediation using biogenic nanoparticles (BNPs) synthesized via plant, bacterial, fungal, and algal systems as emerging multifunctional materials for addressing complex wastewater matrices. Conventional wastewater treatment methods, such as coagulation, flocculation, and sedimentation, have limitations in efficiency, chemical demand, and operational costs, prompting interest in innovative BNP-based approaches. BNPs demonstrated enhanced adsorption, catalytic transformation, and antimicrobial activity due to their biomolecule-rich surfaces, enabling efficient contaminant removal across industrial, municipal, textile, pharmaceutical, and agricultural wastewater systems. It has been evaluated BNP synthesis routes and mechanisms, pollutant removal efficiencies, environmental behavior, and implementation challenges. This review summarized that BNPs achieve enhanced adsorption, catalytic transformation, and antimicrobial activity, with removal efficiencies of 80–98% for dyes and 70–95% for heavy metals, while offering improved biocompatibility and reduced ecotoxicity compared with chemically synthesized nanoparticles. This review also highlights critical barriers to large-scale application, including synthesis variability, economic scalability, regulatory uncertainty, and community acceptance. Moreover, environmental fate analyses reveal that post-treatment transformations, including sulfidation, organometallic complexation, and surface passivation, play a decisive role in governing BNPs' persistence, bioavailability, and ecological impact.