The ineffective control of the release of pollutants into water has led to serious water pollution. Compared with conditions in the past, the polluting components in aquatic environments have become increasingly complex. Some emerging substances have led to a new threat to the safety of water. Therefore, developing cost-effective technologies for the remediation of water pollution is urgently needed. Adsorption has been considered the most effective operational unit in water treatment processes and thus adsorption materials have gained wide attention. Among them, metal organic frameworks (denoted as MOFs) have been rapidly developed in recent years due to their unique physicochemical performance. They are characterized by larger porosity and larger specific surface area, easier pore structure designing, and comfortable structural modification. In many fields such as adsorption, separation, storage, and transportation, MOFs show a better performance than conventional adsorption materials such as active carbon. Their performance is often dependent on their structural distribution. To optimize the use of MOFs, their fabrication should be given more attention, without being limited to conventional preparation methods. Alternative preparation methods are given in this review, such as diffusion, solvent thermal, microwave, and ion thermal synthesis. Furthermore, developing functionalized MOFs is an available option to improve the removal efficiencies of a specific contaminant through pre-synthetic modification and post-synthesis modification. Post-synthesis modification has become a recent research hotspot. The coupling of MOFs with other techniques would be another option to ameliorate the remediation of water pollution. On one hand, their intrinsic drawbacks may be reduced. On the other hand, their performance may be enhanced due to their interaction behaviors. Overall, such coupling technologies are able to enhance the performance of an individual material. Because the excellent performance of MOF materials has been widely recognized and their developments have received wide attention, especially in environmental fields, in the present work we provide a review of fabrication of MOFs so as to motivate readers to deepen their understanding of the use of MOFs.

With the rapidly increasing industrial and agricultural development, a large amount of sludge has been produced from much water treatment. Sludge treatment has become one of the most important environmental issues. Resource utilization of sludge is one of the important efficient methods for solving this issue. Sludge-based activated carbon (SBAC) materials have high adsorption performance and can effectively remove environmental pollutants including typical organic matter and heavy metals through physical and chemical processes. Therefore, developing efficient SBAC materials is important and valuable. At present, preparation, modification, and application of SBAC materials have gained widespread attention. This paper provides a review of the research on SBAC preparation and modification and its utilization in removing environmental pollutants. It included the following topics present in this review: conventional and new methods for preparation of SBAC were clearly present; the effective methods for improving SBAC performance via physical and chemical modification were reviewed; and the correlation of their physic-chemical properties of SBAC with pollutants’ removal efficiencies as well as the removal mechanisms was revealed. SBAC has a better adsorption performance than commercial activated carbon in some aspects. Furthermore, it is a cost-effective technique and has a wide range of raw materials. However, there are still some drawbacks to its research; thus, some suggestions for further research were given in this review.