Besides food, environmental security, and energy, fresh water is a crucial key element for the sustainable and promising development of societies. This can be explained by the flourishing population growth, and as a consequence, it has led to developing industrialization. As a result, the fresh water demand increased dramatically in many developing and developed countries. Furthermore, climate change, which is tied up with rapid industrialization growth, has further complicated and exacerbated the balance between water supply and its demand. Therefore, severe water shortage and the consequence of water stress can be expected. Recent predictions highlighted the fact that this issue will be even worse in the near future. All these, hence, spotlight the importance and emergence of searching for new and sustainable water sources (Shirazi et al., 2012; Goh et al., 2016; Frappa et al., 2020). Conventionally, fresh water has been supplied from rivers, deep wells, and seasons’ rainfall. These sources cannot meet the worldwide increasing fresh water demand. During the last decades, seawater has been introduced as a promising and infinitive intake source for fresh water production in desalination plants. The thermally driven desalination processes such as multi-effect distillation (MED) and multi-stage flash (MSF) were utilized as the first generation of desalination technologies (Ghaffour et al., 2013). However, these technologies are not promising anymore due to the high energy consumption, which is completely in contrast with the sustainability approach in the circular economy. The next generations of water treatment and desalination technologies have been employing a (semi-)permeable barrier which is known as a “Membrane” (Matsuura, 2001; Ravanchi et al., 2009). In order to supply the fresh and potable water from saline sources (i.e., brackish and seawater), reverse osmosis (RO), which is among the most well-developed and utilized membrane processes, has been used (Goh e
