Although for the past 100 years, fertilizer technologies have increasingly used renewable resources, the majority of manufactured products are still based on mineral deposits and fossil fuels. The European Commission has set a goal of 30% reduction of non-renewable resources in fertilizer production. This can only be accomplished if there are incentives for wastes valorization and fines for making use of non-renewable raw materials. This will enable the reduction of eutrophication of surface waters due to the presence of nitrogen and phosphorus, originating from agricultural fields fertilizers. The use of biological waste is a practical solution to recover valuable fertilizer components. In order to effectively implement technologies based on biological resources, it is necessary to construct small wastes solubilization or fertilizer installations at the site of waste generation, which will solve the problem of waste transport or sanitary hazards.

In recent years, biosorption process has become an economic and eco-friendly alternative treatment technology in the water and wastewater industry. In this light, a number of biosorbents were developed and are successfully employed for treating various pollutants including metals, dyes, phenols, fluoride, and pharmaceuticals in solutions (aqueous/oil). However, still there are few technical barriers in the biosorption process that impede its commercialization and thus to overcome these problems there has been a steadily growing interest in this research field. This resulted in large numbers of publications and patents each year. This review reports the state of the art in biosorption research. In this review, we provide a compendium of know-how in laboratory methodology, mathematical modeling of equilibrium and kinetics, identification of the biosorption mechanism. Various mathematical models of biosorption were discussed: the process in packed-bed column arrangement, as well as by suspended biomass. Particular attention was paid to patents in biosorption and pilot-scale systems. In addition, we provided future aspects in biosorption research.