Both steelmaking via an electric arc furnace and manufacturing of portland cement are energy-intensive and resource-exploiting processes, with great amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission and alkaline solid waste generation. In fact, most CO2 capture and storage technologies are currently too expensive to be widely applied in industries. Moreover, proper stabilization prior to utilization of electric arc furnace slag are still challenging due to its high alkalinity, heavy metal leaching potentials and volume instability. Here we deploy an integrated approach to mineralizing flue gas CO2 using electric arc furnace slag while utilizing the reacted product as supplementary cementitious materials to establish a waste-to-resource supply chain toward a circular economy. We found that the flue gas CO2 was rapidly mineralized into calcite precipitates using electric arc furnace slag. The carbonated slag can be successfully utilized as green construction materials in blended cement mortar. By this modulus, the global CO2 reduction potential using iron and steel slags was estimated to be ~138 million tons per year.

With the rapid development of technology, electronic devices have become omnipresent in our daily life as they have brought much convenience in every aspect of human activity. Side-by-side, electronic waste (e-waste) has become a global environmental burden creating an ever-growing ecological problem. The transient device technology in which the devices can physically disappear completely in different environmental conditions has attracted widespread attention in recent years owing to its emerging application potential spanning from biomedical to military use. In this work, we demonstrated the first attempt for a dissolvable ecofriendly flexible photodetector using a hybrid of graphene and chlorophyll on a poly­(vinyl alcohol) substrate. The whole device can physically disappear in aqueous solutions in a time span of ∼30 min, while it shows a photoresponsivity of ∼200 A W–1 under ambient conditions. The high carrier mobility of graphene and strong absorption strength of a green photon harvesting layer, chlorophyll, result in the photocurrent gain of the device as high as 103 with subsecond response time under the illumination of red light. The newly designed photodetector shown here yields zero waste with a minimum impact on the environment, which is very useful for the development of the sustainability of our planet.

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