Recent advancement and application of environmental electrochemistry

Abstract

Water scarcity, groundwater depletion, and surface water pollution have become some of the major challenges for environmental engineers in the 21st century. Thus, wastewater treatment becomes crucial to maintaining the quality of surface water sources. Large cities and industries are the major contributors to wastewater, and this large amount of wastewater must be treated partially or completely before discharging into any water body. As land availability is a practical issue, compact wastewater treatment plant is the need of the hour. Electrochemical treatment can be put to work in such cases. Electrocoagulation, electrodialysis, and electrooxidation can be used to treat wastewater at a faster rate than conventional treatment processes. Thus, it requires a lesser plant footprint for treating the same volume of wastewater. Besides, water scarcity energy shortage is inevitable because of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Therefore, researchers should focus on harvesting the untapped energy present in wastewater in form of chemical energy. The bioelectrochemical system serves this purpose by oxidizing the organic waste present in the wastewater by employing microbes as a catalyst. Microbial fuel cell, microbial electrolysis cell, microbial electrosynthesis, enzymatic fuel cell, microbial solar cell, plant microbial fuel cell, and microbial desalination cell are different types of bioelectrochemical systems that are employed for not only treating wastewater but also generating electricity, producing value-added by-product and desalination of water. This chapter focuses on recent advancements and applications of electrochemical technology and bioelectrochemical system. � 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.