ABSTRACT
Water pollution due to oil spill, accidental dumping of crude oil, petroleum by-products, and hazardous organic solvents from chemical industries has posed significant challenges for the marine ecosystem. The dreaded impact of the oil spill is enormous and associated with an adverse effect on biodiversity. The aforementioned factors have increased demand for an effective solution to remove oil and organic solvents mixed with water. Traditional practices like gravitational separation, skimming, flotation, centrifugation, flocculation, and coagulation have shortcomings. The significant drawbacks include low separation efficiency, prolonged separation time, high energy requirement, man-hour, and complicated steps that warrant autonomous technology. In this regard, macroporous sorbents are considered an economical and viable bid for oil recovery owing to their ease of fabrication, availability, and round-the-clock operational capability. Keeping the aforementioned factors in mind, this chapter provides a broad perspective to the readers on various macroporous sorbents developed hitherto, including carbon-based, polyurethane, melamine sponge, filtration membranes (including metallic mesh, fabrics, textile, thin film), and manufacturing challenges associated with it such that technologist, chemist, can come up with novel strategies to develop mechanically robust, elastic, durable all-weather sorbents, which will remain stable for thousands of cycle without causing any deleterious effect on absorption capacity and reusability for various oil spill remediation.
