Phosphate is essential for global food production, yet its finite reserves and inefficient recovery from wastewater threaten 

long-term sustainability. Conventional removal and recovery methods are often limited by high chemical consumption, 

energy demand, and secondary waste generation. Liquid membrane (LM) technologies have emerged as an alternative by 

integrating extraction and stripping within a single step, enabling selective and low-concentration separation. This review 

critically evaluates bulk (BLM), emulsion (ELM), and supported liquid membrane (SLM) systems, emphasizing how 

configuration governs transport kinetics, interfacial area, and operational stability. Reported data show that ELM achieves 

rapid and high extraction efficiencies (E: >100%) due to its large interfacial area, whereas BLM (E: 97–99%) is constrained

by diffusion-limited transport and slow mass transfer despite its simplicity. SLM offers a compromise, delivering 

high selectivity (E: >100%) and continuous operation, though limited by membrane stability and carrier loss. Across LM 

systems, performance is governed less by material choice alone than by the interplay between carrier-solute interactions, 

phase compatibility, and transport reversibility. While LM technologies reduce multi-step processing, they do not eliminate 

all transport constraints but redistribute them across coupled interfaces, introducing trade-offs between stability, flux, and 

selectivity. Future progress, therefore, depends on rational formulation design, improved membrane stability, and integration

with downstream recovery processes to enable practical and scalable circular phosphorus management.