Water pollution is a global problem threatening the entire biosphere and affecting the life of many millions of people around the world. Not only is water pollution one of the foremost global risk factors for illness, diseases and death, but it also contributes to the continuous reduction of the available drinkable water worldwide. Delivering valuable solutions, which are easy to implement and affordable, often remains a challenge. Here we review the current state-of-the-art of available technologies for water purification and discuss their field of application for heavy metal ion removal, as heavy metal ions are the most harmful and widespread contaminants. We consider each technology in the context of sustainability, a largely neglected key factor, which may actually play a pivotal role in the implementation of each technology in real applications, and we introduce a compact index, the Ranking Efficiency Product (REP), to evaluate the efficiency and ease of implementation of the various technologies in this broader perspective. Emerging technologies, for which a detailed quantitative analysis and assessment is not yet possible according to this methodology, either due to scarcity or inhomogeneity of data, are discussed in the final part of the manuscript.

中文翻译：

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可持续的重金属水净化技术：回顾与分析

水污染是一个威胁整个生物圈并影响世界数百万人生命的全球性问题。水污染不仅是造成疾病，疾病和死亡的全球首要风险因素之一，而且还有助于全球范围内可饮用水的持续减少。提供易于实施和负担得起的有价值的解决方案通常仍然是一个挑战。由于重金属离子是最有害，分布最广的污染物，因此在这里，我们将回顾当前用于水净化的最新技术，并讨论其在重金属离子去除中的应用领域。我们在可持续性的背景下考虑每种技术，这是一个很大程度上被忽略的关键因素，它实际上可能在实际应用中的每种技术的实施中起着举足轻重的作用，因此我们引入了一个紧凑的指标，即排名效率乘积（REP），以从更广阔的角度评估各种技术的效率和易用性。本文的最后部分讨论了新兴技术，由于数据的稀缺性或不均匀性，尚无法根据这种方法进行详细的定量分析和评估。