A Comprehensive Study on Bioremediation of Electronic Waste in Developing Nations: A Pathway for Circular Economy and Sustainable Development

ABSTRACT

The sustainable management of electronic waste in developing nations is becoming global concern. Electronic waste is often characterized as the waste discarded from electronic and electric devices that mainly arises from mobile phones, laptops, smartwatches, batteries, circuit boards, television sets, fluorescent lamps, and audio systems and is becoming the most rapidly growing waste stream in the world owing to fast technological progress and growth in consumers’ demands. This is mainly occurring due to involvement of informal recycling activities, lack of consumer awareness, lack of cost‐effective technologies, and insufficient waste management infrastructure that leads to unscientific methods of disposing waste such as open burning, uncontrolled dumping that result in massive environmental pollution and threaten human health through heavy metals and persistent toxic substances. Keeping in view, bioremediation technology has recently been considered a viable and eco‐friendly alternative approach for resource recovery and hazardous substances removal from discarded electronic wastes. Accordingly, the present review summarizes critically and comprehensively recent advances on microbial‐mediated electronic waste bioremediation, which is affected by the presence of microbial strains, bioleaching mechanisms, degradation pathways, and resource recovery efficiencies as well as integrated physical–chemical–biological treatment processes. Furthermore, the current paper has also identified the knowledge gaps, processing constraints, scaling‐up challenges, and practical issues for an industrial application. Moreover, it also discusses the essential techno‐economic parameters that influence practicability of bioleaching, including recovery efficiency, operation cost, reactor optimum operation, and integration of the process. Furthermore, a sustainable electronic waste management framework is proposed for developing countries with the concept of circular economy, integration of formal and informal recycling sectors, policy‐oriented public involvement, and effective resource recovery.