Advanced Oxidation as an Alternative Treatment for Wastewater. A Review

Every year millions of cubic meters of wastewater are discharged into water bodies, which are treated in an inadequate way, these procedures being inefficient to achieve what is required by law or for use within industrial processes. In these cases, and due to the scarcity of water, the use of advanced oxidation processes is being used as an alternative treatment which are based on physicochemical processes capable of producing profound changes in the chemical structure of pollutants, involving the generation and the use of transitory species with great oxidizing power, mainly the hydroxyl radical, which can be generated by photochemical means or by other forms of energy, and is highly effective in the oxidation of organic matter. This review aims to perform an analysis of the influence of treatments on the decontamination process.