Electrochemical Treatment of Food Wastewaters

The food industry creates large amounts of environmentally hazardous wastewater, which can be challenging to treat due to high levels of oil, volatile organic compounds, heavy metals and suspended solids. Electrochemical methods are being developed to effectively eliminate or convert pollutants through processes including electrochemical oxidation (EO) or reduction, electrocoagulation (EC), electrodialysis, photoelectrochemical and sonoelectrochemical methods. These emerging electrochemical technologies can be applied to increase the biodegradability of pollutants as a pretreatment, later in the treatment process to reach effluent standards, or in a combination treatment process. Electrochemical treatment has been shown to effectively reduce both biochemical and chemical oxygen demand as well as total solids in food wastewater. High energy demand is a significant obstacle to the implementation of electrochemical processing of wastewaters, so developing technologies focus on energy savings and simultaneous reclamation of wastewater materials.