Degradation of Synthetic Azo Dyes of Textile Industry: a Sustainable Approach Using Microbial Enzymes

By releasing of azo dye through textile effluent, textile industry is the main cause of water pollution resulting into acute effect on environment and human health. Development of any eco-friendly and cost-effective method that may address the drawbacks to physical or chemical methods of dye removal is the recent global priority. Physical or chemical methods for textile wastewater pretreatment are of high cost, extremely energy consuming, and environmentally low efficient and generate toxic sludge. Thus, the use of microbial technique for textile dye degradation will be eco-friendly and is probably a lucrative alternative to physico-chemical processes. Microbial enzymes, viz. laccase and azoreductase, are cost-efficient, easy to harvest, easily downstream processable, and effortlessly mobilizable. Recent research trends on nanoparticle-microbial enzyme conjugates are also highly efficient to remove the azo dye from textile waste within a few minutes. But unfortunately, due to some gap between academia and industry, these methods remain only limited up to laboratory and its industrialization is still a challenge. The present review is an illustrated compilation of the use of microbial enzymes in removal of textile dyes. © 2017, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.