Degradation of organic pollutants in wastewater by bicarbonate-activated hydrogen peroxide with a supported cobalt catalyst

Developing novel technologies to cleanup wastewater has attracted attention for a long while in academic and industrial communities not only for environmental issues but also for recycling water sources. This work demonstrates that bicarbonate-activated H2O2 can be applied as a novel oxidant source in pollutant degradation. Using a supported cobalt catalyst, bicarbonate-activated H2O2 can efficiently degrade various dyes and phenol at ambient temperature. Because the reaction media remains weakly basic during degradation, the cobalt leaching from the solid catalyst has been efficiently avoided and the lifetime of the catalyst can be extended to above 180 h without significant activity loss in a fixed-bed test. Different scavengers, including ascorbic acid, t-butanol, sodium azide, benzoquinone, and tiron, have been tested to identify the active species, which may be involved in pollutant degradation, and it was found that singlet oxygen and the carbonate radical may play a key role in the degradation process.