in water as anionic arsenate (As(V)) or arsenite (As(III)), with the latter being acutely toxic and difficult to remove. [3] Commonly employed techniques to remove arsenic are coagulation-flocculation or chemical adsorption, both which require significant chemical input, and extensive pretreatment steps for As(III) to As(V) conversion. [3c] Thus, novel removal technologies that integrate removal and conversion of arsenic are critical for sustainable environmental management.The development of advanced materials for water purification, selective contaminant removal, and improved energy efficiency is critical to tackling water-energy nexus challenges, including through the design of more effective membranes and field-assisted adsorbents. [4] Electrochemical methods for water treatment such as capacitive deionization (CDI) have garnered increased attention as a desalination technology, and also as a heavy metal removal platform, due to their efficiency and low environmental footprint compared to typical methods. [5] Electrosorption systems benefit from inherent modularity and scalability, which opens the door to point of source remediation systems. Electrochemical conversion of As(III) to As(V) on carbon electrode has been investigated previously for CDI-based arsenic remediation. [5l,6] However, low arsenic selectivity in the presence of competing ions has limited the total uptake capacity of carbon-based CDI, [5c,h-l] as most arsenic contaminated water sources are composed of 10 to 1000-fold excess salts. [7] Thus, the design of molecularly selective functional adsorbents is necessary to address these materials chemistry limitations.Recent work has shown redox-active/Faradaic materials as an attractive platform for selective water contaminant removal. [8] Redox-active metallopolymers have demonstrated remarkable uptake of anions with significant selectivity, both of organic anions and heavy metal oxyanions. [8b,9] At the same time, asymmetric electrochemical systems have traditionally been proposed in energy-storage applications to enhance capacitance and electrochemical properties. [10] Here, we leverage this electrochemical design for the first time to integrate both the separation and the reactions step electrochemically at functionalized electrodes. We seek to combine two redox-active polymer Advanced redox-polymer materials offer a powerful platform for integrating electroseparations and electrocatalysis, especially for water purification and environmental remediation applications. The selective capture and remediation of trivalent arsenic (As(III)) is a central challenge for water purification due to its high toxicity and difficulty to remove at ultra-dilute concentrations. Current methods present low ion selectivity, and require multistep processes to transform arsenic to the less harmful As(V) state. The tandem selective capture and conversion of As(III) to As(V) is achieved using an asymmetric design of two redox-active polymers, poly(vinyl)ferrocene (PVF) and poly-TEMPO-methacrylate (PTMA). D...

Electrosorption and capacitive deionization technologies can be effective processes in removing heavy metal for water purification, wastewater treatment, resource recovery, and environmental remediation.

Electro‐responsive functional materials can play a critical role in selective metal recovery and recycling due to the need for molecular differentiation between transition metals in complex mixtures. Redox‐active metallopolymers are a promising platform for electrochemical separations, offering versatile structural tuning and fast electron transfer. First, through a judicious selection of polymer structure between a main‐chain metallopolymer (polyferrocenylsilane) and a pendant‐group metallopolymer (polyvinylferrocene), charge‐transfer interactions and binding strength toward competing metal ions are tuned, which as a result, dictate selectivity. For example, almost an order of magnitude increase in separation factor between chromate and meta‐vanadate can be achieved, depending on polymer structure. Second, these metallopolymer electrodes exhibit potential‐dependent selectivity that can even flip ion preference, based solely on electrical means—indicating a control parameter that is orthogonal to structural modifications. Finally, this work presents a framework for evaluating electrochemical separations in multicomponent ion mixtures and elucidates the underlying charge‐transfer mechanisms resulting in molecular selectivity through a combination of spectroscopy and electronic structure calculations. The findings demonstrate the applicability of redox‐metallopolymers in tailored electrochemical separations for environmental remediation, value‐added metal recovery, waste recycling, and even mining processing.

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Redox‐active polymers offer a powerful platform for integrating separation and reactions. In article number 1906877, Xiao Su and co‐workers report an asymmetric electrochemical system consisting of a metallopolymer and an organic radical polymer for the synergistic capture and conversion of arsenic. The proposed strategy highlights new opportunities for redox‐active materials in electrochemical process intensification, water purification, and environmental remediation.