Electroreductive dehalogenation: crossroads for waste detoxification and conversion to valued compounds

The environmental impact of halogenated organic compounds is bound to their present (and past) use in a wide variety of industrial and civil applications, thanks to the wide spectrum of their physical and chemical properties, which, in turn, are at the basis of the assessed risks connected with their persistency and rapid dissemination in soils, water- and air-streams. An integrated approach for environmental remediation and protection requests both long-term activities devoted to eradicate the risks, and immediate actions to drastically abate the toxicity of the actual wastes while controlling the treatment costs. In this complex context, the electrochemical technologies can play a key role in terms not only of detoxification efficiency, but also of energy/cost saving and earning potentialities. The exploitation of these technologies for the electroreductive (hydro)dehalogenation of organic halides is discussed in terms of the recent advances [1-5] on the preparation of cathode materials, reactor design, and investigation tools/methodologies (e.g. C-ME and FEXRAV [3,6]) purportedly developed to characterize both the reaction pathways and the process performances. [1] O. Lugaresi, H. Encontre, C. Locatelli, A. Minguzzi, A. Vertova, S. Rondinini, Ch. Comninellis, Electrochem. Commun. submitted [2] O. V. Klymenko, O. Buriez, E. Labbè, D.-P. Zhan, S. Rondinini, Z.-Q. Tian, I. Svir, Ch. Amatore, ChemElectroChem 2014, 1, 227-240 [3] A. Minguzzi, C. Locatelli, O. Lugaresi, A. Vertova, S. Rondinini, Electrochim. Acta 2013, 114, 637-642 [4] O. Lugaresi, A Minguzzi, C Locatelli, A. Vertova, S. Rondinini, Ch. Amatore, Electrocatalysis 2013, 4, 353-357 [5] A. Minguzzi, O. Lugaresi, G. Aricci, S. Rondinini, A. Vertova, Electrochem. Commun. 2012, 22, 25-28 [6] A. Minguzzi, O. Lugaresi, C. Locatelli, S. Rondinini, F. D’Acapito, E. Achilli, P. Ghigna, Anal. Chem. 2013, 85, 7009−7