Carbon-based adsorbents as proficient tools for the removal of heavy metals from aqueous solution: A state of art-review emphasizing recent progress and prospects

Carbon-centric adsorbents (CCA) are diverse forms, from simple biochar (BC) to graphene derivatives, carbonnanotubes
(CNTs), and activated carbon (AC), which have been vastly explored for their removal of a plethora ofpollutants, including heavy metals (HM). The prominent features of CCA are their operational attributes like extensivesurface area, the occurrence of flexible surface functional groups, etc. This work offers a comprehensive examination ofcontemporary research on CCA for their superior metal removal aptitude and performances in simulated solutions andwastewater flows; via portraying the recent research advances as an outlook on the appliances of CACs for heavy metaladsorption for removal via distinct forms like AC, BC, Graphene oxide (GO), and CNTs. The bibliometric analysis toolwas employed to highlight the number of documents, country-wise contribution, and co-occurrence mapping basedon the Scopus database. The coverage of research works in this review is limited to the last 5 years (2017–2021) tohighlight recent progress and prospects in using CCAs such as AC, BC, GO, and CNTs to remove HM from aqueousmedia, which makes the review unique. Besides an overview of the common mechanisms of CACs, the future scope ofCAC, especially towards HM mitigation, is also discussed in this review. This review endorses that further efforts shouldbe commenced to enhance the repertory of CCAs that effectively eliminate multiple targeted metals in both simulatedand real wastewater.