Background: Due to its high toxicity and bioaccumulation, the existence of mercury in the environment is always a big threat to human beings. In order to control mercury pollution, scientists have put great efforts in the past decades.

Methods: Precipitation, adsorption, membrane separation, biological treatment and ion exchange are reviewed as a remover for mercury removal. For each material type, we not only reported on the removal mechanism, but also discussed the best areas for it. The correlation method and step-to-step focusing method have been used for references.

Results: For better mercury removal, the ways above are compared together. The mechanisms of removing mercury in different ways are summarized in this paper.

Conclusion: With the exploration and application of research, people have mastered a variety of mature technologies for the treatment of mercury-containing wastewater. Using inexpensive adsorbents is a cost-effective method for treating low concentrations of heavy metal wastewater. Ion exchange with a fast removal rate has been widely used in the field of heavy metal removal from wastewater. The biological treatment method can effectively treat low-concentration mercurycontaining wastewater. However, there is still a need to develop novel mercury removers with high capacity, fast removal rate, and low removal limit. Nanomaterials with a high specific surface area on substrate with synergistic effects, such as high adsorption and ion exchange, are the future research points.

背景：由于其高毒性和生物蓄积性，环境中汞的存在始终对人类构成巨大威胁。为了控制汞污染，科学家在过去的几十年中付出了巨大的努力。

方法：沉淀，吸附，膜分离，生物处理和离子交换已被视为去除汞的去除剂。对于每种材料类型，我们不仅报告了去除机理，而且还讨论了去除机理。相关方法和逐步聚焦方法已被用作参考。

结果：为了更好地去除汞，将以上方法进行了比较。本文总结了以不同方式去除汞的机理。

结论：随着研究的探索和应用，人们已经掌握了多种处理含汞废水的成熟技术。使用廉价的吸附剂是处理低浓度重金属废水的一种经济有效的方法。具有快速去除速率的离子交换已广泛用于从废水中去除重金属的领域。该生物处理方法可以有效地处理低浓度含汞废水。然而，仍然需要开发具有高容量，快速去除速率和低去除极限的新型汞去除剂。在基材上具有高比表面积并具有协同作用（例如高吸附和离子交换）的纳米材料是未来的研究重点。