Nanotechnology for a Safe and Sustainable Water Supply: Enabling Integrated Water Treatment and Reuse
Abstract
Ensuring reliable access to clean and affordable water is one of the greatest global challenges of this century. As the world's population increases, water pollution becomes more complex and difficult to remove, and global climate change threatens to exacerbate water scarcity in many areas, the magnitude of this challenge is rapidly increasing. Wastewater reuse is becoming a common necessity, even as a source of potable water, but our separate wastewater collection and water supply systems are not designed to accommodate this pressing need. Furthermore, the aging centralized water and wastewater infrastructure in the developed world faces growing demands to produce higher quality water using less energy and with lower treatment costs. In addition, it is impractical to establish such massive systems in developing regions that currently lack water and wastewater infrastructure. These challenges underscore the need for technological innovation to transform the way we treat, distribute, use, and reuse water toward a distributed, differential water treatment and reuse paradigm (i.e., treat water and wastewater locally only to the required level dictated by the intended use). Nanotechnology offers opportunities to develop next-generation water supply systems. This Account reviews promising nanotechnology-enabled water treatment processes and provides a broad view on how they could transform our water supply and wastewater treatment systems. The extraordinary properties of nanomaterials, such as high surface area, photosensitivity, catalytic and antimicrobial activity, electrochemical, optical, and magnetic properties, and tunable pore size and surface chemistry, provide useful features for many applications. These applications include sensors for water quality monitoring, specialty adsorbents, solar disinfection/decontamination, and high performance membranes. More importantly, the modular, multifunctional and high-efficiency processes enabled by nanotechnology provide a promising route both to retrofit aging infrastructure and to develop high performance, low maintenance decentralized treatment systems including point-of-use devices. Broad implementation of nanotechnology in water treatment will require overcoming the relatively high costs of nanomaterials by enabling their reuse and mitigating risks to public and environmental health by minimizing potential exposure to nanoparticles and promoting their safer design. The development of nanotechnology must go hand in hand with environmental health and safety research to alleviate unintended consequences and contribute toward sustainable water management.
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Except for magnetic nanoparticles, separating the majority of exhausted nanoparticles from the purified water for subsequent reuse remains a difficult effort.
“Additionally, except for magnetic nanoparticles, separating the majority of exhausted nanoparticles from the purified water for subsequent reuse remains a difficult effort.109,110”
From Emerging nanotechnology approaches for sustainable water treatment and heavy metals removal: a comprehensive review (2025) · cites this paper as [110]
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- Authors
- Qu, X., Brame, J., Li, Q., & Alvarez, P. J. J.
- Affiliations
- Rice University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Li, Qilin
- Alvarez, Pedro J. J.
- Venue
- Accounts of Chemical Research
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2012-06-27
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 834-843
- ISSN
- 0001-4842 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-4898
- OpenAlex
- W1970446300
- Cited by
- 799
- References
- 58
- Citations by year
- 2026: 38 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 74 · 2023: 76 · 2022: 74 · 2021: 107 · 2020: 60 · 2019: 57 · 2018: 67 · 2017: 54 · 2016: 52 · 2015: 40 · 2014: 31 · 2013: 14 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 49.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Accounts of Chemical Research (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Waste Management and Disposal › Wastewater Treatment and Reuse
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Membrane Separation Technologies
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Environmental remediation with nanomaterials
- Keywords
- nanotechnology, water treatment, water reuse, nanomaterials, water quality sensors, adsorbents, solar disinfection, membranes, decentralized water treatment, point-of-use treatment, aging water infrastructure, nanoparticle safety, sustainable water management, water scarcity, water pollution
- MeSH terms
- Conservation of Natural Resources, Safety, Water Supply, Water Purification, Nanotechnology
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