Industrial wastewater from electronics manufacturing, metal processing and other sectors often contains two difficult pollutants at once: high levels of salt and toxic heavy metals. Current treatment methods typically address those problems separately, creating costly, complex systems that can produce hazardous brines or metal-laden sludge. Now, a group of researchers at Rice University and Vanderbilt University has created an electrochemical platform that could do both jobs at once.

A team led by Shihong Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, has shown that electrochemical ion pumping (EIP) can be programmed to desalinate wastewater while selectively recovering dissolved metals such as copper.

The approach, published in Nature Water, could offer a new path toward water reuse and resource recovery from industrial brines. Longqian Xu, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, is the study’s first author.