| Summary: | Water provision is essential for domestic and industrial activity. With population growth and industrialisation, the access to affordable clean water has become a pervasive problem. To tackle the problem, a considerable amount of research has been targeted on developing robust decontamination technologies that can treat wastewater at lower cost, using less energy and with a minimum chemical usage and associated impact on the environment. In this contribution, we highlight several surfactant and/or polymer-based technologies which have been developed over the past few decades for water treatment. Among these emerging technologies, polymer–surfactant complexation and flocculation is emerging as a new, economical and sustainable process for removing the contaminants from dilute aqueous solutions, and then recovering them into a highly concentrated valuable product, before recycling the polymer and surfactant in the next cycle without deterioration of treatment performance. Both membrane-based and nonmembrane-based technologies are addressed.
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