Electrochemical Recovery of Heavy Metals from Ground Water at Military Sites

The Department of Defense has undertaken an ambitious environmental restoration program at thousands of facilities in the U.S. Many of these facilities have been contaminated by the discharge of dissolved heavy metals. Often these contaminants migrate into the ground water where they pose a serious threat to aquatic systems and to human health. The remediation of soils and ground water is usually accomplished by first pumping the contaminated water to the surface. A number of methods are available to remove heavy metals from water including precipitation, membrane separation, ion exchange or adsorption. Each of these processes have limitations and it is expensive to treat the large volumes of water that are brought to the surface. The proposed project concerns the development of a new electrochemical metals recovery process for the treatment of contaminated ground water and waste water. The process has the potential to be applied below the surface in an extraction well, thereby eliminating the need tobring the contaminated water to the surface. In Phase I, a bench scale system will be evalulated using simulated ground water spiked with heavy metals. This will provide the technical foundation for conducting a pilot-scale field demonstration in Phase II. Anticipated Benefits: The anticipated result of this project is the development of a versatile process for the separation and recovery of metals from waste water and industrial process streams. The method will be used for the restoration of contaminated soils and ground water. The process has a wide range of industrial uses, for example, in metal plating and finishing, ore processing and mining, and in the manufacture of photographic films, jewelry and printed circuit boards. The process can be applied for the removal of toxic metallic wastes from military and private sector sites.