Electrochemically Assisted Remediation of Pesticides in Soils and Water: A Review

Pesticide occurrence in soils and water is an emerging and highly significant environmental issue on which the attention of the scientific community is currently focused. The search for new technologies that can be used to remediate this significant problem is a topic of the major relevance. Promising results have been obtained using electrochemical technologies, showing that these technologies may help to solve this problem in the near future. Lab-scale studies have shown that electrokinetic processes can be used to significantly remediate soil, either by transporting pollutants by electro-flushing or by combining these processes with bioprocesses or permeable reactive barriers. Electrokinetic processes are suitable for remediating clay soils but many factors affect the results, and more work must be done to elucidate the fundamental issues involved. Anodic oxidation, cathodic dechlorination, electrocoagulation, and specially the electro-Fenton process are very promising technologies for pesticide removal from water. Most of these technologies can be used to attain complete pesticide removal and a significant group of these technologies can also achieve complete mineralization of pesticides.