ABSTRACT
Basic research in nanomaterials is currently blooming, and as a consequence, nanotechnologies are quickly arising and expanding to all sorts of fields. Although some applications already exist, the transformation of nanoscience-based knowledge into nanotechnologies for environmental remediation is still on its early childhood. The enormous increase in welfare we have enjoyed in the lapse of a scarce century has introduced enormous pressure on the environment. Pollution is nowadays everywhere on the planet, from the highest mountains to the deepest ocean trenches, spreading through all sorts of ecosystems, from the equator to the poles. There is an urgent need first to be able to act on the different environmental compartments, starting with gaseous and liquid effluents that rapidly spread pollution but, in the middle term, also to be able to act on soils and sediments. And, above all, it will be essential to stop new inputs of pollution to the environment and to be able to monitor potential illegal or irregular emissions. All this can be achieved through nanotechnology, from better adsorbents to more efficient catalysts or photocatalysts and, of course, nanosized devices that allow production of more selective, sensible and stable sensors. The future is open, and we have to write it. In what follows, we briefly describe the fundamentals of some of the main environmental applications in which nanomaterials are used nowadays for environmental remediation, together with some examples, not with the aim of being exhaustive or reviewing the field, but as an introduction that discusses some key points to allow further expansion by the reader.
