review · International Journal of Environmental & Analytical Chemistry
Discharging untreated electroplating wastewater risks creating harmful toxic metal-organic complexes in the environment. Multiple treatment technologies exist to extract toxic metals and eliminate organic pollutants, including chemical precipitation, adsorption, coagulation, ion exchange, electrocoagulation, membrane filtration, advanced oxidation, and biorecovery. Combining different methods frequently yields higher pollutant removal efficiencies across a wider range of contaminants than standalone systems. Because individual techniques specialise in capturing particular substances that others leave behind, selecting an optimal method depends strictly on treatment objectives and the targeted contaminants. Operational costs also vary substantially across treatment configurations. When targeting heavy metals, reported costs range from approximately 0.35 US dollars per cubic metre for an adsorption process followed by electrodeposition, up to 4.45 US dollars per cubic metre when using adsorption with nano zero valent iron.
Electroplating produces complex industrial waste containing hazardous heavy metals and persistent organic compounds that threaten aquatic environments. Understanding the comparative technical performance and operational expenses of available remediation processes enables environmental managers to select appropriate decontamination strategies. This comparison helps industrial facilities reduce toxic discharge while planning realistic budgets for wastewater management.
This assessment assists electroplating operators, wastewater treatment plant designers, and environmental engineering firms in selecting remediation systems tailored to specific factory discharges. Because it synthesises published performance and cost figures for established techniques, the insights support near-market system design and capital allocation. However, as a literature review rather than a product demonstration, practical commercial deployment requires site-specific testing against real industrial effluent conditions.
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The discharge of untreated electroplating wastewater could lead to the formation of toxic metal-organic complexes that is harmful for the environment. There are several processes reported to treat electroplating wastewater such as chemical precipitation, adsorption, coagulation and flocculation, ion exchange, electrocoagulation, membrane filtration, advanced oxidation process and biorecovery. These methods provide the possibility to capture different toxic metals and remove organic pollutants. The combination of different processes together has shown higher efficiencies in removing a wide range of contaminants than single treatment systems. The main challenge is identifying the highest treatment performance and most cost-efficient process. This review provides an overview of treatment technologies for electroplating wastewater and describes the strengths and drawbacks among them. The efficiency of different systems and kinds of pollutants removed, along with a comparison between these systems have been analysed. When comparing the treatment technologies, it is hard to identify the most efficient one as each method has been successful in removing certain pollutants that has not been recovered from the other methods. Therefore, making the decision on identifying the best treatment technology depends on the objective of the treatment and the targeted pollutants. Furthermore, the cost of different technologies has been evaluated based on literature to have a brief look at cost differences between the technologies. When targeting removal of heavy metals, the highest cost of treatment has been reported at around 4.45 $/m3 for the adsorption method employing nano zero valent iron (nZVI). While the lowest cost of treatment has been reported at about 0.35 USD/m3 employing an adsorption method followed by electrodeposition.
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DOI: 10.1080/03067319.2022.2098486
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