Advancing Wastewater Treatment with Metal Oxide/Biochar Hybrids as Sustainable Solutions

Wastewater treatment is an urgent issue in environmental sustainability. Standard treatment techniques often fail to remove pollutants while remaining environmentally safe. The potential application of metal oxide/biochar hybrids as novel materials for wastewater treatment is evaluated in this chapter. Metal oxides are known to have outstanding adsorption capability, while biochar is a renewable and carbon-negative alternative. This chapter discusses the preparation of metal oxide/biochar hybrids using techniques such as impregnation, co-precipitation, and pyrolysis surface area analysis to characterize hybrid morphology, structure, and surface properties. The potential adsorption capacities of these hybrids were also evaluated against different contaminants usually found in wastewater, such as organic pollutants, heavy metals, and nutrients. Other modern methods, such as Zn/TiO2/biochar, have achieved up to 80% photodegradation efficiency when illuminated with visible light while degrading long-lasting antibiotics such as sulfamethoxazole from water sources without UV radiation.