Industrial processes generate a variety of separation challenges including purity targets during recycling operations, effluent limitations for wastewater treatment, or recovery operations from complex mixtures. Traditionally, these separations have been performed using precipitation chemistry, ion exchange, solvent extraction, or distillation. While effective, these options can generate large amounts of waste sludge, cost prohibitive disposal in landfills, trucking of waste product(s), and large energy usage, especially in the case of distillation. In this talk, the ability to use electrochemistry to selectively remove and recovery metals from aqueous solutions will be reviewed. Real-world operation of electrochemical separation systems will show the benefits of these processes for multiple applications while also highlighting some of the challenges that electrochemical processes face. Future opportunities in this field will be discussed as well.

Particular attention will be made to the recovery of copper from industrial streams. Copper is a component in solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, semiconductor chips, metal plating, and life science applications, making its use particularly broad. Often, the separation and recovery of high purity copper at concentrations lower than 5,000 ppm is not carried out due to the complexity of commercial separation options. The use of electrochemical separations cells can be employed in these applications to separate copper with >95% current efficiency while recovering elemental copper with >99.9% purity. Different electrodes and cell designs are used depending on the concentrations and flows where these separations are conducted and will be reviewed along with future copper opportunities.