Ball milling, as a cost-effective and eco-friendly approach, has been popular in materials synthesis to solve problems involving toxic reagents, high temperatures, or high pressure, which has the potential for large-scale production. However, there are few reviews specifically concentrating on the latest progress in materials characteristics before and after ball milling as well as the adsorptive application for aqueous pollutants. Hence, this paper summarized the principle and classification of ball milling and reviewed the advances of mechanochemical materials in categories as well as their adsorption performance of organic and inorganic pollutants. Ball milling has the capacity to change materials’ crystal structure, specific surface areas, pore volumes, and particle sizes and even promote grafting reactions to obtain functional groups to surfaces. This improved the adsorption amount, changed the equilibrium time, and strengthened the adsorption force for contaminants. Most studies showed that the Langmuir model and pseudo-second-order model fitted experimental data well. The regeneration methods include ball milling and thermal and solvent methods. The potential future developments in this field were also proposed. This work tries to review the latest advances in ball-milled materials and their application for pollutant adsorption and provides a comprehensive understanding of the physicochemical properties of materials before and after ball milling, as well as their effects on pollutants’ adsorption behavior. This is conducive to laying a foundation for further research on water decontamination by ball-milled materials.

Developing efficient and sustainable pollution control technologies has become a research priority in the context of escalating global environmental pollution. Nano zero-valent iron (nZVI), with its high specific surface area and strong reducing power, demonstrates remarkable performance in pollutant removal. Still, its application is limited by issues such as oxidation, passivation, and particle aggregation. White rot fungi (WRF) possess a unique enzyme system that enables them to degrade a wide range of pollutants effectively, yet they face challenges such as long degradation cycles and low degradation efficiency. Despite the significant role of nZVI in pollutant remediation, most contaminated sites still rely on microbial remediation as a concurrent or ultimate treatment method to achieve remediation goals. The synergistic combination of nZVI and WRF can leverage their respective advantages, thereby enhancing pollution control efficiency. This paper reviews the mechanisms, advantages, and disadvantages of nZVI and WRF in pollution control, lists application examples, and discusses their synergistic application in pollution control, highlighting their potential in pollutant remediation and providing new insights for combined pollutant treatment. However, research on the combined use of nZVI and WRF for pollutant remediation is still relatively scarce, necessitating a deeper understanding of their synergistic potential and further exploration of their cooperative interactions.

The aim of this paper was to effectively reduce environmental pollution and further improve the enzymatic hydrolysis rate of corn straw. Thus, a pretreatment method for activating cellulose by using ionic liquid to treat metal ion solution was developed. By investigating the effects of the three factors of substrate mass fraction, reaction temperature, and reaction time, and the interaction between the factors on the pretreatment effect, the response surface design method was used to optimize the conditions of ionic liquid (1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride) treatment of corn straw after activation, and the physicochemical structure and enzymatic hydrolysis efficiency before and after treatment were compared and analyzed. The experimental results showed that the yield of reducing sugar was increased by 157.85% and 150.41%, respectively, compared with the untreated corn straw. The analysis of chemical composition and structure showed that the cellulose content of the material increased significantly by 68.11% and 60.54%, respectively, after ionic liquid treatment. The results of the scanning electron microscope (SEM) observation and X-ray diffraction (XRD) showed that the relative crystallinity of the material decreased after ionic liquid treatment, which was more conducive to the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose.