Three birds with one stone: Full-component recovery of strongly acidic arsenic complex wastewater via combining electro-redox and electrodialysis

Full-component green recovery of As-contained acid wastewater shows great prospect demanding on both urgent resource need and environment protection. In this work, we firstly constructed a three-chamber electrochemical system for full-component recovery of As-Cu acidic wastewater, combining electrochemical redox and electrodialysis techniques to recover metals and acids simultaneously. In which CeO2@CC and Cu plate electrode materials were selected and the middle chamber was separated by cation-exchange membrane (CEM) and anion-exchange membrane (AEM). In the anode chamber, 93.84% As(III) was oxidized and adsorbed by the CeO2@CC anode within 2 h. Meanwhile, 100% copper was reduced and deposited on the cathode. The pH of the intermediate chamber solution was reduced to 1.2. Besides, economic benefits and carbon emission accounting indicated that the system has better economic and environmental benefits for the full-component recovery of As-Cu strongly acidic wastewater. This work brings a new insight in future wastewater resource recovery and purification.