Environmental Contaminants in Water and Wastewater: Sources, Fate, Toxicity, and Treatment

Protecting water quality from a wide range of biological, chemical, and emerging pollutants is a global environmental and public health concern. Industrial processes, urban, agriculture runoff, atmospheric deposition, population growth have caused incessant discharge of contaminants into various water matrices. In addition to legacy pollutants (e.g., nutrients, heavy metals, organic matter), emerging contaminants (e.g., PFAS, microplastics/nanoplastics, endocrine disrupting compounds, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, disinfection byproducts, antibiotic resistance determinants) contributes to water quality deterioration. When these contaminants enter the aquatic streams, it undergoes multifaceted transport, transformation, and accumulation impacting their persistence and bioavailability. Contaminant amalgamation and transformation products reveal toxicity profiles different from their parent compound furthermore complicating the environmental risk assessment and potential impacts on the ecosystem and the human health. Hence having the awareness of the source, fate, toxicity, and the risks linked with environmental contaminants is crucial to protect water quality and ensuring sustainable water resource management.Monitoring, assessing risks, and contaminant removal from water and wastewater are rapidly evolving, with advances in analytical chemistry, molecular biology, environmental toxicology, water treatment technology, and data science. Pioneering treatment solutions involve advanced oxidation, adsorption, biosorption, membrane separation, electrochemical methods, engineered bioprocess, nature-based solutions, and hybrid processes are studied increasingly to tackle current and emerging water quality issues.This Research Topic invites original research articles, review papers, methods papers, short communications, and case studies that expands our awareness on environmental contaminants in water and wastewater. Contributions focusing on contaminant occurrence, fate, transport, toxicity, monitoring, treatment, resource recovery, and sustainable management are particularly encouraged.The scope of this Research Topic is mentioned below;1.     Sources and occurrence of environmental contaminants (microplastics, PFAS, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, heavy metals, to name a few).2.     Environmental fate, transport, and transformation.3.     Toxicity and risk assessment4.     Analytical methods and monitoring 5.     Wastewater surveillance and wastewater-based epidemiology6.     Treatment technologies7.     Resource recovery and sustainable water management8.     Microbial contaminants and antibiotic resistance Topic editors: Visva Bharati Barua, Biswanath Saha, Vivek Pulikkal Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84279/environmental-contaminants-in-water-and-wastewater-sources-fate-toxicity-and-treatment