Abstract

Pesticides are chemicals that are meant to be effective against various pests and weeds that cause economic damage to various crop systems. They are also hazardous to the health of aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Moreover, pesticides have the tendency to leach out directly into the soil system and thus contaminate the quality of the surface and groundwater. The metabolites of pesticides are also highly persistent in the environment and have harmful effects on soil fertility as well as aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Various advanced oxidation processes have been employed to remove pesticides from water such as photolysis, Fenton and photo-Fenton, electrocatalytic oxidation, membrane filtration, heterogeneous photocatalysis, chemical oxidation, ozonation, etc. Heterogeneous photocatalysis is found to be the most-efficient and cost-effective technique for the removal of pesticides as well as their complete mineralization. This chapter, therefore, is considered the first of its kind that summarizes and highlights the use of heterogenous photocatalysis to improve the quality of wastewater for agricultural purposes for promising sustainable agricultural technology.