Sustainable Wastewater Treatment via Dye-Surfactant Interaction: A Critical Review

Dye containing industrial effluent streams are a cause of major environmental concerns, especially those which are not easily biodegradable. Many techniques have been developed to remove dyes from the waste stream; however, most of them suffer from a weakness of efficiency and effectiveness when an attempt is made for industrial implementation. A recently developed dye removal method using surfactants offers the benefits of high removal efficiency, ease of waste disposal, scope of efficient recovery, and the use of nontoxic and less harmful reagents. This review aims to contribute to this growing area by summarizing the mechanisms of dyesurfactant interactions and investigating the influence of different process parameters such as pH, concentration of surfactants, dyes, and electrolytes, temperature, etc. on the efficiency of the method. The review also attempts to present future research scopes of these techniques with a critical analysis of industrial applicability.