Recent advances in polysaccharide-based adsorbents for wastewater treatment

The existence of toxic water contaminants (heavy metals, dyes, phenols, oils, pharmaceuticals and nutrients) restricts the sustainable supply of clean water globally. Among various economic and accessible wastewater disposal technologies, adsorption is the most extensively practiced approach due to its economic, feasible and sustainable characteristics. In recent years, polysaccharides have been extensively employed for constructing adsorption materials due to their intrinsic properties including high adsorptive ability, low cost, renewability, biodegradability, biocompatibility and ease of modification. Here, a systematic review of polysaccharide-based adsorbents for wastewater treatment is given. This review is aimed at providing: (1) general design principles for polysaccharide-based adsorbents, (2) some critical factors that may affect the adsorption and (3) future directions for the development of polysaccharide-based wastewater adsorbents. Overall, this review provides guidelines on the rational fabrication and application of polysaccharide-based adsorbents, which will be beneficial to novice/expert researchers in the field of wastewater remediation. Furthermore, the authors expect that this review provokes interdisciplinary discussions that would bring a revolution to the application of polysaccharide-based wastewater adsorbents. •Polysaccharide-based adsorbents for wastewater treatment were summarized.•Examples of common polysaccharides for preparing adsorbents were introduced.•Adsorption characterizations and design principles for adsorbents were summarized.•A brief review and knowledge gaps of polysaccharide-based adsorbents were outlined.