Azo dye wastewater treatment is urgent necessary nowadays. Electrochemical technologies commonly enable more efficient degradation of recalcitrant organic contaminants than biological methods, but those rely greatly on the energy consumption. A novel process of biofilm coupled with electrolysis, i.e., bioelectrochemical system (BES), for methyl orange (MO) dye wastewater treatment was proposed and optimization of main influence factors was performed in this study. The results showed that BES had a positive effect on enhancement of color removal of MO wastewater and 81.9% of color removal efficiency was achieved at the optimum process parameters: applied voltage of 2.0 V, initial MO concentration of 20 mg/L, glucose loads of 0.5 g/L and pH of 8.0 when the hydraulic retention time (HRT) was maintained at 3 d, displaying an excellent color removal performance. Importantly, a wide range of effective pH, ranging from 6 to 9, was found, thus greatly favoring the practical application of BES described here. The absence of a peak at 463 nm showed that the azo bond of MO was almost completely cleaved after degradation in BES. From these results, the proposed method of biodegradation combined with electrochemical technique can be an effective technology for dye wastewater treatment and may hopefully be also applied for treatment of other recalcitrant compounds in water and wastewater.

Azo dye is widely used in the textile industry since it is cost effective and simple to use. However, it becomes a continuous source of environmental pollution due to its carcinogenicity and toxicity. Various methods had been used to remove the azo dye in solution. One of the famous and frequently used is the Fenton process. The Fenton process is one of the advanced oxidation processes where iron catalysed hydrogen peroxide to generate hydroxyl radical. Treating azo dyes in solution requires a catalyst to enhance the process of degradation. Herein, high entropy alloys (HEAs) have been proposed as a catalytic material to enhance the performance of Fenton process for azo dye degradation. HEAs have been reported as a promising catalyst due to its high surface area. The higher the number of active sites, the higher the rate of azo dye degradation as more active sites are available for adsorption of azo dyes. The results have shown that HEAs can be used as a catalyst to fasten the Fenton reaction since the degradation time is proven to be shorter in the presence of HEAs. The method derived from the result of this study will contribute in treating azo dyes for wastewater management in the Fenton process.