Research Status and Treatment of Emerging Contaminants in the Yellow River Basin

In recent years, the problem of emerging contaminants (ECs) in the Yellow River Basin has posed a serious challenge to the safety of the basin's water environment. Based on the bibliometric method, this study systematically combed 611 related literatures at home and abroad from 1990 to 2024 to reveal the research progress, pollution characteristics and treatment technologies. The results show that the research on new pollutants in the Yellow River Basin has gone through three stages of preliminary exploration (1990-2004), slow development (2005-2018) and rapid growth (2019-2024), and has become an international hotspot in the last five years with a 56.3% share of the number of publications. The high-frequency keywords show that water body and sediment are the core research media, and the pollutants cover antibiotics, perfluorinated compounds, persistent organic pollutants and microplastics. The research focuses on spatial distribution characteristics, source analysis and ecological risk assessment, but the migration and transformation mechanism of pollutants still needs to be deepened. In terms of treatment technologies, progress has been made in physicochemical, bioremediation and photocatalytic technologies, but they face limitations such as sediment masking effect, high cost of nano-materials, and insufficient adaptability to composite pollution. Future research needs to deepen the analysis of multi-scale pollutant evolution mechanism, optimize the “microbial-plant” synergistic remediation and other ecological control strategies, and promote the scientific and systematic management system of the “screening, evaluation and control” life cycle management system, in order to enhance the safety and security of the water environment in the watershed, so as to enhance the ability of guaranteeing the safety of water environment in the basin.