Can electrocoagulation technology be integrated with wastewater treatment systems to improve treatment efficiency?

Considerable amounts of domestic and industrial wastewater that should be treated before reuse are discharged into the environment annually. Electrocoagulation is an electrochemical technology in which electrical current is conducted through electrodes, it is mainly used to remove several types of wastewater pollutants, such as dyes, toxic materials, oil content, chemical oxygen demand, and salinity, individually or in combination with other processes. Electrocoagulation technology used in hybrid systems along with other technologies for wastewater treatment are reviewed in this work, and the articles reviewed herein were published from 2018 to 2021. Electrocoagulation is widely employed in integrated systems with other electrochemical technologies or conventional methods for effective removal of different pollutants with less cost and sometimes over shorter durations of operation. It has also been observed that the hybrid effects besides increasing the removal efficiency can overcome the disadvantages of using electrocoagulation alone, such as less sludge formation, high cost of operation and increased life of the used electrodes, and stable flux of water with longer periods of operation. More than 20 types of other technologies have been combined efficiently with electrocoagulation.