Abstract
Heavy metals removal and recovery from wastewater is a sustainable approach for wastewater treatment and environmental sustainability. This is also helpful to meet the strict effluent discharge norms. Acknowledging that wastewater presents a useful resource and the value of precious, semiprecious, and heavy metals has made it interesting to recover metals from wastewater. This chapter describes the sources, importance, and toxicity of heavy metals and the need to remove them before discharging effluents. The popular physical and chemical technologies, such as isolation, immobilization, toxicity and/or mobility reduction, physical separation, and extraction, used for the removal of heavy metals have been discussed along with their limitations. Finally, the configuration and application of bioelectrochemical systems (BES)-based systems present a sustainable alternative for the removal and recovery of heavy metals. Therefore in this chapter a general account of the process, principle, and BES that have been used for heavy metal removal and recovery has been covered.
