Treatment of olive oil mill wastewater by combined process electro-Fenton reaction and anaerobic digestion

In this work, we investigated an integrated technology for the treatment of the recalcitrant contaminants of olive mill wastewaters (OMW), allowing water recovery and reuse for agricultural purposes. The method involves an electrochemical pre-treatment step of the wastewater using the electro-Fenton reaction followed by an anaerobic bio-treatment. The electro-Fenton process removed 65.8% of the total polyphenolic compounds and subsequently decreased the OMW toxicity from 100% to 66.9%, which resulted in improving the performance of the anaerobic digestion. A continuous lab-scale methanogenic reactor was operated at a loading rate of 10 g chemical oxygen demand (COD) l−1 d−1 without any apparent toxicity. Furthermore, in the combined process, a high overall reduction in COD, suspended solids, polyphenols and lipid content was achieved by the two successive stages. This result opens promising perspectives since its conception as a fast and cheap pre-treatment prior to conventional anaerobic post-treatment. The use of electro-coagulation as post-treatment technology completely detoxified the anaerobic effluent and removed its toxic compounds.