Recent Strategies for Environmental Remediation of Organochlorine Pesticides

The amount of organochlorine pesticides in soil and water continues to increase; their presence has surpassed maximum acceptable concentrations. Thus, the development of different removal strategies has stimulated a new research drive in environmental remediation. Different techniques such as adsorption, bioremediation, phytoremediation and ozonation have been explored. These techniques aim at either degrading or removal of the organochlorine pesticides from the environment but have different drawbacks. Heterogeneous photocatalysis is a relatively new technique that has become popular due to its ability to completely degrade different toxic pollutants—instead of transferring them from one medium to another. The process is driven by a renewable energy source, and semiconductor nanomaterials are used to construct the light energy harvesting assemblies due to their rich surface states, large surface areas and different morphologies compared to their corresponding bulk materials. These make it a green alternative that is cost-effective for organochlorine pesticides degradation. This has also opened up new ways to utilize semiconductors and solar energy for environmental remediation. Herein, the focus of this review is on environmental remediation of organochlorine pesticides, the different techniques of their removal from the environment, the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques and the use of specific semiconductors as photocatalysts.