Activation of peroxymonosulfate by CuCo₂O₄ nano-particles towards long-lasting removal of atrazine

For the last decade, the use of herbicides has become increasingly important in agriculture for weed control. As the most common used s-triazine herbicide, atrazine (ATZ) is widely applied for its high efficiency. Furthermore, ATZ has been applied for more than 40 years in over 80 countries (Hayes et al. 2002). However, because ATZ is heavily used in huge quantities, it has long been exposed to the environment. In addition, due to its high water mobility and persistence, traces of ATZ have been detected in surface water, even in groundwater (Khan et al. 2014; Li et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2020a). It will cause serious health problems, including impaired sexual development, deformities, and cancer (Hayes et al. 2002) when the concentration of ATZ exceeds 0.0001 mg/L (Pelizzetti et al. 1990). The application of ATZ has been prohibited by official order in many European countries (Ji et al. 2015), but its use still remains widespread in China (Chen et al. 2011). Therefore, it is necessary to continuously improve and develop efficient ATZ removal techniques.

In recent years, conventional advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), such as photocatalytic (Luo et al. 2015; Khaleel et al. 2019), Fenton (De Laat et al. 1999; Klamerth et al. 2009), Fenton-like (Zhang & Zhou 2019), and ozonation (Kuosa et al. 2009), have been developed to degrade organic pollutants in wastewater. All of the above methods can produce hydrogen radicals (HO^•), whose redox potential is relatively high (E^θ = 2.8 V). However, the deficiencies of the above treatment were non-negligible, including short life span of HO^•, rigorous pH condition, and high cost. It has been found that SO₄^•− based on AOPs has a good performance on ATZ removal with a second-order rate constant of 10⁶–10⁹ M⁻¹·s⁻¹ (Zhao et al. 2016a). As a radical of high redox potential (E^θ = 2.5–3.1 V) (Zhang et al. 2019a; Nimai et al. 2020), SO₄^•− has a long-life span to contact with the targeted contaminant (Du et al. 2020). Moreover, because of its great selectivity (Li et al. 2018), SO₄^•− can react actively with compounds of unsaturated bonds and aromatic ring structures (Li et al. 2017). A common and efficient source of SO₄^•− is peroxymonosulfate (PMS), which has been successfully activated by many methods, such as transition metals (Anipsitakis & Dionysiou 2003; Zhou et al. 2016; Wang et al. 2020b), UV irradiation (Olmez-Hanci et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2015), ultrasound (Lifka et al. 2003; Mahamuni & Adewuyi 2010; Zou et al. 2014), carbon-based catalysts (Chen et al. 2019), semiconductors (Jo et al. 2018), and so on.

Among those activation methods, transition metals have been regarded as one kind of low-cost and effective method, which is widely used in wastewater treatment to activate PMS. Transition metal catalysis can be divided into homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis. The homogeneous catalysis often has high removal efficiency. For example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) can be degraded by Fe²⁺/PMS system with over 90% PCB removal within 24 h (Rastogi et al. 2009). However, the homogeneous catalysts for PMS activation have some shortcomings, including high metal ion dosage, production of metal oxide sludge, difficult to be separated and recovered from solution, and strict pH conditions (Li et al. 2017; Ding et al. 2019). Especially, for its high solubility and toxicity, Co²⁺ ion released into the solution after treatment will cause secondary pollution. Many countries have prohibited the application of Co²⁺ in wastewater treatment as a consequence.

In contrast to homogeneous catalysts, heterogeneous catalysts are easier to recycle from the solution. More importantly, heterogeneous catalysts usually produce little ion leaching, and, as a result, have been widely studied to activate PMS. CuCo₂O₄ spinel nanoparticles (NPs) have the characteristics of stable crystal structure, large specific surface area, low solubility, and are also highly efficient to activate PMS (Feng et al. 2015b). In fact, CuCo₂O₄ is widely used in supercapacitors, electrochemical sensors, and lithium batteries for its low cost, higher electronic conductivity, and excellent capacitance performance than either copper oxide or single Co (Liu et al. 2018; Xu et al. 2019). Notably, CuCo₂O₄ has excellent electrochemical properties, such as high electrical conductivity, which may contribute to electron transfer in AOPs to generate more radicals. Moreover, as a bimetallic oxide, CuCo₂O₄ has higher catalytic activity than monometallic oxide due to the synergistic catalytic effect of Cu and Co (Song et al. 2020). However, only a few studies have reported its application in the field of AOPs. Therefore, it is worth studying the removal of ATZ by CuCo₂O₄/PMS system.

In this work, the nanomaterial CuCo₂O₄, that can activate PMS efficiently, was studied. The main goals of the study are as follows: (i) to investigate the effects of main experimental parameters and inorganic anions on the removal of ATZ; (ii) to prove the performance of CuCo₂O₄/PMS system by two comparative experiments; (iii) to evaluate the stability and reusability of CuCo₂O₄ by five recycling experiments; (iv) to identify the free radicals which make a contribution to ATZ removal; (v) to deduce the catalytic mechanism from known results; (vi) to analyze the intermediate products of ATZ in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system and infer the removal pathway of ATZ.

Atrazine (≥97.0%), cobalt nitrate (Co(NO₃)₂·6H₂O, ≥98.5%), copper nitrate (Cu(NO₃)₃·3H₂O, ≥98.5%), copper oxide (CuO, ≥98.5%), cobalt sesquioxide (Co₂O₃, ≥98.5%), sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃, ≥98.5%), sodium nitrate (NaNO₃, ≥98.5%), sodium hydrogen phosphate (NaHPO₄, ≥98.5%), humic acid (HA, ≥90.0%), sodium chloride (NaCl, ≥98.5%), ethanol (EtOH), tert-butyl alcohol (TBA), and sodium hydroxide (NaOH, ≥98.0%) were purchased from Chengdu Kelong reagent company. Potassium peroxymonosulfate (PMS, KHSO₅·0.5KHSO₄·0.5 K₂SO₄) was obtained from Sigma-Aldrich. The original solution of ATZ (5 mg/L) was obtained through dissolving ATZ with ultrapure water with stirring for 12 h. Ultrapure water (18.2 MΩ. cm) used in the experiments was produced by a UPH purification system (Ulupure, China).

In this study, CuCo₂O₄ nanoparticles were synthesized by sol-gel method (Zhao et al. 2016b). First, 0.025 mol Co(NO₃)₂·6H₂O and 0.05 mol Cu(NO₃)₃·3H₂O were dissolved in 100 mL deionized water and mechanically stirred at 300 rpm for 10 min. Then, 0.09 mol citric acid was added to the solution and stirred at 80 °C for 2 h. Next, after the mixture had been evaporated in a water bath of 90 °C for 1 h, the obtained gel complex was transferred to the oven and baked to a powder at the temperature of 90 °C. Lastly, the powder was transferred to a muffle furnace and heated to 550 °C at a heating rate of 5 °C/min, and eventually dried at the temperature of 550 °C for 5 h.

In general, all ATZ removal experiments were conducted with water bath heating, and a mechanical stirring speed of 300 rpm, reaction time of 30 min, and initial pH value of 6.8. At the beginning of the experiment, 150 mL of atrazine solution was transferred into a 400 mL beaker. Then, the beaker was placed in a water bath until the temperature of the water bath rose to 30 °C. Subsequently, the required amount of catalyst and oxidant were added at the same time. The samples were taken with syringes at predetermined intervals and filtered immediately with 0.45 μm PTFE syringe filter disks. Prior to sampling, as quenching agents of free radicals, 20 μL tert-butanol and ethanol were added to the sampling tube. Each data were the average of corresponding experiments repeated three times. Except for organic solvents, the medium of all other solutions is ultrapure water.

FEI Tecnai G2 F20 S-TWIN (Hillsboro, Oregon, USA) scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were utilized to scan the surface morphology of the fresh CuCo₂O₄ NPs. The surface elementary compositions of CuCo₂O₄ NPs were obtained by energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS). The CuCo₂O₄ NPs were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) EMPYREAN diffractometer (PANalytical B.V., The Netherlands). An X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) (AXIS Ultra DLD, Kratos Co., UK) was used to characterize the chemical oxidation states on the surface of fresh and reacted CuCo₂O₄ NPs.

The morphology and microstructure of CuCo₂O₄ NPs was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). According to Figure 1(a) and 1(b), CuCo₂O₄ NPs showed an irregular layered structure with some nanoparticles on the surface. In addition, CuCo₂O₄ NPs were nanoparticles with diameters varying from 80 to 100 nm, measured by ‘Nano measurer’ software. Figure 1(c) shows the chemical atomic ratio of Co and Cu is 2.27:1. The percentage of O after usage increased for the increase of the absorbed H₂O on the CuCo₂O₄ NPs. Furthermore, CuCo₂O₄ NPs were characterized by XRD as shown in Figure 1(d). Figure 1(d) shows that the eight characteristic diffraction peaks at 2θ = 19.0°, 31.4°, 36.8°, 39°, 44.5°, 55.5°, 59.6°, 65.2° can be indexed to (111), (220), (311), (222), (400), (422), (511), and (440) of spinel CuCo₂O₄ (Panayotov & Mehandjiev 1987), indicating the high purity of CuCo₂O₄. Moreover, the peak at 35.5° could be indexed to (−111) of CuO (JPCDS 48-1548), similar to the study by Wang et al. (2020c). The results were consistent with the removal of sulfamethazine by CuCo₂O₄/PMS system reported by Feng et al. (2015b). In addition, CuCo₂O₄ NPs exhibit a good performance in the structural stability since there was little difference and no new diffraction peak in the reacted particles, compared with the fresh CuCo₂O₄.

To further understand the composition and chemical states of the elements on the surface of CuCo₂O₄, the XPS spectra of fresh and reacted CuCo₂O₄ NPs were acquired. Figure 2(a) shows a survey scan of CuCo₂O₄ NPs and illustrates the existence of Cu 2p, Co 2p, and O 1 s. Moreover, the binding energy was corrected by the carbon 1 s peak (284.8 eV) to obtain accurate spectra. Figure 2(b)–2(d) show the core level spectra of Co 2p, Cu 2p, and O 1 s.

The core-level spectra of Co 2p are shown in Figure 2(b) and four peaks at the binding energy of 780.45, 782.03, 795.54, and 797.30 eV were obviously observed. Corresponding to Co 2p_3/2 and Co 2p_1/2, respectively, both fitting peaks at 780.45 and 795.54 eV, which had a spin-energy separation of around 15 eV, indicated the existence of Co(II) (Wang et al. 2020c). In addition, the fitting peaks at 782.03 eV and 797.30 eV were assigned to Co(III) (Kibsgaard et al. 2012; Xu et al. 2018). In contrast to fresh CuCo₂O₄, the reacted CuCo₂O₄ NPs showed little difference in characteristic peak position and no new fitting peak was observed. As well, the peak area of Co(II) decreased from 45.44% to 42.25%, inferring the transformation between Co(II) and Co(III).

The XPS spectra of Cu 2p are displayed in Figure 2(c) to better understand the role of Cu in PMS activation process by CuCo₂O₄. Cu 2p_3/2 was deconvoluted into two peaks with the binding energy of 934.08 eV and 937.17 eV, which were indexed into Cu(I) and Cu(II), respectively (Chen et al. 2020). Compared with the fresh CuCo₂O₄, the atom ratio Cu(I)/Cu(II) of reacted CuCo₂O₄ decreased from 7.29 to 7.00, which was supposed to be the conversion between Cu(I) and Cu(II).

Figure 2(d) depicts the core level spectra of O 1 s. The peak located at the binding energy of 530.61 eV was indexed into the lattice oxygen O₂⁻ (O_A) in CuCo₂O₄ NPs and the peak at around 532.01 eV belongs to the OH (O_B) adsorbed at the surface of CuCo₂O₄ (Xu et al. 2016). Compared with the fresh CuCo₂O₄, the area of the fitting peak at 532.01 eV decreased from 48.29% to 14.36% in the reacted CuCo₂O₄. Meanwhile, a new peak assigned to the O (O_C) of adsorbed H₂O appeared at the binding energy of 533.27 eV, suggesting that the hydroxyl groups on the surface of CuCo₂O₄ are converted into adsorbed water after the activation of PMS in the treatment process (Xu et al. 2016).

Analysis of BET and FT-IR is located in Text S1 in the Supplementary Material.

The effect of CuCo₂O₄ NPs' dosage (0–400 mg/L) on the removal of ATZ was studied systematically. As seen from Figure 3(a) and 3(b), the ATZ removal was 7% when only PMS was added because of the weak oxidation capacity of PMS. However, with another addition of 20 mg/L CuCo₂O₄, the ATZ removal was enhanced significantly from 7% to 60% within 30 min. This manifests that PMS alone had a feeble effect on the removal of ATZ, and CuCo₂O₄ is superior in activating PMS. Moreover, the ATZ removal was highly dependent on the amount of catalyst when its addition was less than 150 mg/L. When its dosage increased to 150 mg/L, a removal efficiency of >99% was achieved. Meanwhile, the k_obs at 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄ (0.160 min⁻¹) was nearly six times of that obtained at 20 mg/L CuCo₂O₄ (0.028 min⁻¹) in Figure 3(b). As more CuCo₂O₄ (>150 mg/L) was added, the removal efficiency remained at >99%. Its k_obs increased from 0.160 min⁻¹ to 0.211 min⁻¹, 0.235 min⁻¹, 0.257 min⁻¹ when the dosage of CuCo₂O₄ increased from 150 mg/L to 200 mg/L, 300 mg/L, and 400 mg/L. The reasons for this phenomenon were as follows: (1) the increased active site could promote the activation of PMS at the CuCo₂O₄ NPs dosage of 0–150 mg/L, leading to the enhancement of the removal of ATZ; (2) when the dose of CuCo₂O₄ exceeded 150 mg/L, CuCo₂O₄ was no longer the limiting factor for ATZ removal. However, the number of radicals produced per unit time increased with the dosage of CuCo₂O₄, increasing the k_obs value for ATZ removal. Therefore, the optimum dosage of CuCo₂O₄ was selected as 150 mg/L in the following experiments.

Figure 3(c) and 3(d) show the effect of PMS dosage (0 mM–0.40 mM) on ATZ removal. Compared with the ATZ removal by 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄ alone, the removal of ATZ with the addition of 0.10 mM PMS and 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄ significantly increased to 67% within 30 min of treatment. The phenomenon could be interpreted as follows. The CuCo₂O₄ almost had no adsorption on ATZ; (2) CuCo₂O₄ had a satisfactory performance in activating PMS in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system. Furthermore, with the dose of PMS increasing from 0.10 mM to 0.20 mM, the ATZ removal was enhanced from 67% to >99%. When the addition of PMS exceeded 0.20 mM in the solution, the ATZ removal remained at >99%. For k_obs mentioned in Figure 3(d), when the dosage of PMS increased from 0.1 mM to 0.15, 0.20, 0.25, 0.30, and 0.40 mM, k_obs for ATZ removal increased from 0.052 min⁻¹ to 0.088, 0.160, 0.283, 0.302, 0.368 min⁻¹, respectively. The following points could account for the results: (1) due to the direct oxidation by PMS, the increase of PMS dosage led to the enhancement of the removal of ATZ; (2) the active sites of CuCo₂O₄ had not been completely occupied by PMS, thus, with the increase of PMS, the contact between CuCo₂O₄ and PMS could be enhanced, producing more radicals to accelerate the ATZ removal. However, when more PMS (>0.2 mM) was added, the self-quenching phenomenon by excessive PMS reported by Shahzad et al. (2019) and Jawad et al. (2020) did not occur in the study. At the maximum additive amount of PMS, the excessive PMS in Shahzad's study exceeded 2 mM, which was ten times that in the study. This might be the reason why there was no self-quenching phenomenon in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system. Therefore, the optimum dosage of PMS was selected as 0.2 mM in the following experiment.

The effect of different initial pH (3, 5, 8, 9, and 11) on the removal of ATZ was studied (Figure 4(a) and 4(b)). Figure 4(a) shows that ATZ was barely removed at pH 11 and the highest ATZ removal (>99%) was reached at pH 5. Compared with the initial pH 5, the removal of ATZ at the initial pH 8 and 9 slightly declined to 94 and 85% and the corresponding k_obs for the removal of ATZ decreased from 0.205 to 0.100 and 0.061 min⁻¹, respectively. In addition, the ATZ removal significantly dropped to 9.8% when pH decreased to 3.0 and the k_obs declined from 0.205 to 0.003 min⁻¹.

Figure 4(c) shows the pH variation of the reaction solution at different initial pH. At the initial pH values of 5, 8, and 9, the pH of the solution dropped rapidly in the first 5 min due to the hydrolysis of PMS. For the next 25 min, the pH of the solution was maintained at 4.3, 5.5, and 6.4, respectively. When the initial pH value was 11, the pH of the solution decreased slightly in the first 3 min and then barely changed. At the initial pH value of 3, the pH value remained almost constant during the process of ATZ removal.

The actual wastewater usually contains many kinds of anions and other compounds, including NO₃⁻, HCO₃⁻, HPO₄²⁻, Cl⁻, and humic acid. These inorganic anions and compounds might have a complex effect on the removal of ATZ. As a result, these five substances were added to ATZ solution, respectively, to investigate their effect on ATZ removal. The results are shown in Figure 5(a)–5(f).

The influence of the NO₃⁻ (0, 1, 10, and 25 mM) inorganic anion on the removal of ATZ was investigated in Figure 5(c) and 5(d). The ATZ removal remained at >99% with little change of the k_obs when the concentration of NO₃⁻ increased from 0 to 25 mM. This result reveals that concentration of NO₃⁻ less than 25 mM had a slight influence on the ATZ removal. Furthermore, NO₃⁻ at the concentration of 25 mM showed little inhibition of the removal of ATZ. The results could be interpreted as ATZ removal is not affected by a small amount of NO₃⁻ in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system, which is consistent with the degradation of ATZ by the CoFe₂O₄/PMS system (Li et al. 2018).

As the model compounds of natural organic matter, different concentrations of humic acid (0, 1, 5, and 10 mg/L) were introduced to study its effect on ATZ removal (Figure 5(i) and 5(j)). An apparent inhibition in the removal of ATZ was observed. With the increase of HA, the inhibition for the removal of ATZ also increased. When the addition of HA increased from 0 mM to 1, 5, and 10 mg/L, the removal of ATZ decreased from >99% to 41.9%, 34.5, and 0%. Similar results were also found in Sharma et al. (2015) study. HA has often been applied as quencher for free radicals (Sharma et al. 2015). Therefore, HA may compete with ATZ for SO₄^•− and HO^•, resulting in the decrease of the removal of ATZ.

To prove the activation performance of the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system, PMS alone, CuCo₂O₄ alone, CuO/PMS, and Co₂O₃/PMS systems were set up. Figure 6 shows that the removal of ATZ can achieve 20.9% when only PMS was present in aqueous solution. The results inferred that ATZ could be removed by PMS for direct oxidation. Meanwhile, the 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄ alone system had little adsorption to ATZ. Nevertheless, the removal of ATZ was signally improved in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system. The above results indicated the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system had a significant effect on the removal of ATZ because PMS activated by CuCo₂O₄ produced large amounts of radicals (i.e., SO₄^•− and HO·). Moreover, the performance of CuO and Co₂O₃ was evaluated under the same conditions. As can be seen in Figure 6, the ATZ removal by CuO/PMS could achieve 23.7% and that by Co₂O₃/PMS could reach 50.9%, both of which were far lower than with CuCo₂O₄/PMS. The results suggested that CuCo₂O₄ NPs had a better performance in catalytic activity than CuO or Co₂O₃ alone.

To study the ATZ removal ability of the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system in actual wastewater, four ATZ solutions were prepared with ultrapure water, tap water, river water, and lake water, respectively. The samples of tap water and lake water were taken from Sichuan University, and river water was taken from the Fuhe river in Chengdu. Supplementary Material, Table S1 shows the characteristics of various water matrices. The river and lake water were suction filtered and then used as the solvent for atrazine. The removal of ATZ in these four solutions by CuCo₂O₄/PMS system is illustrated in Supplementary Material, Figure S6. The removal of ATZ reduced in order of deionized water, tap water, river water, and lake water. However, the biodegradability of all solutions after the reaction was improved. As shown in Supplementary Material, Figure S7, the biodegradability of lake water increased slightly from 0.820 to 0.848 (expressed as BOD/COD). This might be because the actual water contained a large number of pollutants that could compete with ATZ for radicals.

Supplementary Material, Table S2 shows the leaching concentration of cobalt and copper iron during reaction in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system. The leaching concentration of the cobalt and copper ion increased with the increase of reaction time. The maximum leaching of Co and Cu was 0.035 mg/L and 0.062 mg/L at 30 min, respectively, which was much lower than the limit concentration (1 mg/L) required by Emission standard of pollutants for copper, nickel, cobalt industry of China (GB 25467-2010). Therefore, the influence of Co and Cu ion leaching was negligible.

Furthermore, as an engineering material, the stability and reusability of CuCo₂O₄ is a key factor of practical application. It was studied by using recycled CuCo₂O₄ NPs catalysts for ATZ removal under uniform operating conditions (i.e., 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄, 0.2 mM PMS, 5 mg/L ATZ, and initial pH of 6.8). Figure 7 showed that the removal of ATZ gradually decreased from >99% to 97.1%, 96.5%, 90.4%, and 86.7%, in five consecutive experiments. The results show that the CuCo₂O₄ NPs had a gradual deactivation in these five recycle experiments because the absorbed intermediates occupied the active sites and small amounts of Co and Cu ions leached into the solution (Ding et al. 2017).

Two radical quenching experiments were carried out to identify the main radicals for the removal of ATZ by adding quenching agent into the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system. As a quenching agent without α hydrogen, tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) could differentiate SO₄^•− and HO^• because its reaction rate constant with HO^• (3.8–7.6) × 10⁸ M⁻¹·s⁻¹ is three orders of magnitude greater than that with SO₄^•− ((4–9.1) × 10⁵ M⁻¹·s⁻¹ (Li et al. 2017). As well, both SO₄^•− and HO^• could actively react with ethanol (EtOH) which had α hydrogen (Li et al. 2017). The reaction rate constant of EtOH and HO^• is (1.2–2.8) × 10⁹ M⁻¹·s⁻¹ which was almost as large as that of EtOH and SO₄^•− ((1.6–7.7) × 10⁷ M⁻¹·s⁻¹) (Xu et al. 2016). Hence, TBA and EtOH can be applied as two kinds of radical scavengers. With the addition of 50 mM TBA, the removal of ATZ decreased from >99% to 79.7% in Figure 8(a). The results could prove that HO^• made a certain contribution to the removal of ATZ. When 50 mM EtOH was added into aqueous solution, there was almost no ATZ removal because almost all HO^• and SO₄^•− were quenched by EtOH. It could be concluded from the above results that both HO^• and SO₄^•− could significantly promote the removal of ATZ and the dominant active radical is SO₄^•− in this study.

The EPR spectra were utilized to identify HO^• and SO₄^•− by using DMPO as the spin trapping agent with the reaction time of 2 min, in order to confirm these two radicals were produced during the activation of PMS. As seen in Figure 8(b), a strong signal of DMPO-HO^• with an intensity ratio of 1:2:2:1 was observed, which could confirm the existence of HO^•. However, the signal of DMPO-SO₄^•− was not obvious. The results could be interpreted as follows: DMPO-SO₄^•− could be converted to DMPO-HO^• via nucleophilic substitution (Equation (14)) (Kang et al. 2018), indicating that the produced DMPO-SO₄^•− was rapidly consumed (Wang et al. 2015). This phenomenon further confirmed that the main radical in the system was SO₄^•−, which also verified the results of radical quenching experiments.

(14)

To speculate on the removal pathway of ATZ, the intermediate products during the reaction process were detected by UPLC-QTOF-MS/MS. The molecular formula, chemical name, abbreviation, charges-to-mass ratio (m/z), the absolute error of m/z, and structural formula of 11 intermediates are listed in Supplementary Material, Table S3. The possible removal pathway of ATZ is proposed in Figure 10. The removal pathway of ATZ included de-alkylation (path 1), dechlorination–hydroxylation (path 2), alkylic-hydroxylation (path 3), alkylic-oxidation (path 4), and olefination (path 5) as demonstrated in Figure 10.

In path 1, the side chain of ATZ was attacked by HO^• and SO₄^•−, then H in the alkyl group was abstracted to form the carbon-based radical. Subsequently, oxygen would react with the carbon-based radical, resulting in forming the by-product containing peroxide radical, which would bring about the generation of de-alkylation intermediate (e.g., CAIT, CEAT, CAAT, OAIT, and OAAT) (Rejto et al. 1983; Acero et al. 2000). In path 2, the aromatic ring of ATZ reacted with the HO^• and SO₄^•− to form radical adduct, which then reacted with water to generate hydroxylated intermediate (e.g., OEIT) (Antoniou et al. 2010; Song et al. 2012). In path 3, the H on the alkyl group of the side chain could be taken away by free radicals to form carbon-based radicals, which could continue to react with water to produce alkyl-hydroxylation intermediate (e.g., CNIT and ODIT). In path 4, under the action of HO^• and SO₄^•−, the products of path 3 were converted to carbon-based radicals, which reacted with oxygen to generate by-products containing peroxide radical. With water molecular break down, the by-product of the previous step became an alkyl-oxidation product (e.g., ONIT and CDIT). In path 5, alkyl-hydroxylation intermediates were dehydrated to form olefins by-product (e.g., OVIT).

In this study, the high ATZ removal (>99%) could be attained in the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system under the optimal experimental conditions of 150 mg/L CuCo₂O₄, 0.2 mM PMS, and initial pH of 6.8. The five co-existing ions (i.e., NO₃⁻, HCO₃⁻, HPO₄²⁻, Cl⁻, and HA) had some different effects on the removal of ATZ. The effects of these five ions on the ATZ removal were, in descending order, HA > HPO₄²⁻ > HCO₃⁻ > Cl⁻ > NO₃⁻. Furthermore, compared with PMS alone, CuCo₂O₄ alone, CuO/PMS and Co₂O₃/PMS systems, the excellent performance of CuCo₂O₄/PMS system was proved. Through five successive runs, on account of the reduction of active sites on the catalyst surface, the ATZ removal decreased from >99% to 97.1%, 96.5%, 90.4%, and 86.7% in turn. In the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system, SO₄^•− was identified as the dominant radical. In addition, the possible catalytic mechanism of the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system was deduced. The removal pathway of ATZ was proposed according to the information of the detected intermediate. In a word, the CuCo₂O₄/PMS system is a potentially effective technique for the removal of ATZ.

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51878423), Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Foundation of Sichuan University (No. 201810610418), and Sichuan Province Science and Technology Innovation Seedling Project (No. 2019084).

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.