Laboratory Experiments on the Electrochemical Remediation of the Environment. Part 9: Microscale Recovery of a Soil Metal Pollutant and Its Extractant

Many soils throughout the world are contaminated with metal salts of diverse toxicity. We have developed an experiment to demonstrate the removal of a metal from an insoluble surrogate soil pollutant, CuCO3·Cu(OH)2, by complexation followed by the simultaneous electrochemical recovery of the ligand (i.e., EDTA) and of the metal in its elemental form (i.e., Cu0). We have calculated speciation diagrams to predict appropriate conditions and to interpret the results.