By 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may be facing water shortages, according to the World Wildlife Federation. By 2030, water demand is forecast to increase by 40%. Over 1.2 billion are basically living in areas of physical water scarcity. And almost 1.6 billion face economic water shortage. And as our population continues to grow, there's just going to be more problems. So, we are in extreme need of that creation which can treat used water and can also provide us electricity so that we can use that water for irrigation purposes, toilet flush, and industrial purposes. In recent years the research work reported about an innovative constructed wetland microbial fuel cell (CW-MFCs) for more deduction of pollutants and instantaneous bioelectricity generation. A microbial fuel cell joined with constructed wetland (CW-MFC) is a novel device to treat the wastewater and create power that has more volume for wastewater treatment, is easy to repair, environmentally friendly, requires less space, and is also most cost-efficient than other devices.
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Energy shortage and environment pollution are the two severe challenges that human beings are facing today. The scarcity of good quality water in the world is a growing problem and the need to purify wastewater for reuse is becoming increasingly important. Organic pollution in wastewater is traditionally treated by aerobic treatment, a very energy intensive and costly process. The present energy sources are mostly high power consuming and structure is also on shaky ground. Constructed wetland (CW) is a man-made wetland which utilizes natural process to treat and improve the quality of water. CW is recognized as an eco-friendly technology and has been used as part of the wastewater treatment process in treating a broad range of wastewater like industrialized wastewater (Vrhovsek et al., 1996), percolated wastewater through landfill (Bulc, 2006), wastewater through agriculture (Minghui et al., 2011), rainstorm and snowstorm water and drainage from acid mines (Nyquist and Greger, 2009), sewage wastewater (Narayan et al., 2018) and domestic wastewater (Solanki et al., 2018a). Constructed wetlands (CW) are “Constructed wetlands can be defined as engineered water saturated areas in which the natural removal processes for the water pollutants are reproduced and enhanced in order to optimize the purification performances” (Hammer, 2020). Constructed wetlands are treatment systems that use processes that are evolved by nature itself which involves wetland flora, fauna, soils, water and air and their connected assemblages improves the quality of wastewater (U.S. EPA, 2000). It take benefit of many of the processes like physical, chemical and biological that occurs in natural wetlands, but does so within more controllable surroundings (Narayan et al., 2018).
In recent years Microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology has emerged a lot which not only can recover renewable energy from waste but also helps in the treatment of it. It has drawn great attention of scientists and researchers in recent years because MFC converts chemical energy into electrical energy through biodegradation of waste (Logan, 2008; Puig et al., 2012; Chhimwal et al., 2017; Corbella et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2013). Generally, a MFC consists of an anode and a cathode chamber. Electrochemically active microorganisms are used as biocatalyst to convert the biodegradable compounds into electricity (Corbella et al., 2015). When organic matter at the anodic region was oxidized, electrons (e-) and protons (H+) were produced and then moved to the cathode. MFC generates electrical current through the transfer of electrons from anode to cathode via the external circuit.
A microbial fuel cell attached with constructed wetland (CW-MFC) system is a latest piece of equipment that embeds the MFC into the constructed wetland (CW) to extravagance the wastewater and produce electricity. CW-MFCs have the advantages of both CWs and MFCs for wastewater treatment (Narayan et al., 2018).