Highly efficient removal of phosphonates from water by a combined Fe(III)/UV/co-precipitation process

Considerable amount of phosphorous is present as organic phosphonates (usually in the form of metal complexes, e.g., Ca(II)-phosphonate) in domestic and industrial effluents, which cannot be effectively removed by traditional processes for phosphate. Herein, we employed a proprietary process, i.e., Fe(III) displacement/UV irradiation/co-precipitation (denoted Fe(III)/UV/NaOH), to enable an efficient removal of Ca(II)-phosphonate complexes from water. The combined process includes three basic steps, i.e., Fe(III) replacement with the complexed Ca(II) to form Fe(III)-phosphonate of high photo-reactivity, UV-mediated degradation of Fe(III)-phosphonate to form phosphate and other intermediates, and the final phosphorous removal via co-precipitation at pH = 6. The operational conditions for the combined process to remove a typical phosphonate Ca(II)-NTMP (nitrilotrismethylenephosphonate) are optimized, where ∼60% NTMP is transformed to phosphate with the total phosphorous reduction from 1.81 mg/L to 0.17 mg/L. Under UV irradiation, the cleavage of NTMP is identified at the C-N and C-P bonds to form the intermediate products and phosphate in sequence. Also, the combined process is employed for treatment of two authentic effluents before and after activated sludge treatment, resulting in the phosphorous drop from 4.3 mg/L to 0.23 mg/L and from 0.90 mg/L to 0.14 mg/L respectively, which is much superior to other processes including Fenton/co-precipitation. In general, the combined process exhibits great potential for efficient removal of phosphonates from contaminated waters.