Abstract

Lightweight Metal Organic Framework adsorbents are chemically versatile and highly porous materials that have been widely tuned to enhance their affinity and capacity to capture metal ions with different chemical natures from aqueous environments. In this chapter, the key chemical features within the MOF chemistry to recover effectively cationic and anionic species from different environments have been described, reviewing in detail their performance to capture heavy metals, precious metal ions, radioactive elements, technologically relevant rare earth elements, chromium, arsenic, and other oxyanions. Depending on the application-specific cases, their performance from single-element dilute solution to highly stringent conditions such as multi-element, radioactive, acidic, aqueous wastes will be described in terms of adsorption capacity, affinity, and reusability. Special attention will be paid to describe the adsorption mechanisms that have been doubtlessly solved, as well as to the multimethodological techniques applied to unravel them.