AOP treatment and reuse of laundry machine wastewater

Sometimes conventional water treatments are unable to decompose organic pollutants, especially dealing with highly polluted wastewater. For such reason, in the last years Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs) have been developed as new technologies for water purification. AOPs are physical-chemical systems that generate hydroxyl radical using different types of energy such as ionizing radiation, ultrasounds, non thermal plasma, UV light with hydrogen peroxide, ozone orphotocatalysts (e.g. TiO ). Any of these methods produces the hydroxyl radical that crushes theorganic compounds, behaving as a molecular chisel, until they turn into carbon dioxide and pure water (mineralization process). 2 [1] Surfactants are widely employed in domestic and industrial activities as the principal active agents in laundry detergents. They represent one of the main families of pollutants which severely contaminate the aquatic environment and the biosphere due to their slow biodegradation.