Extracellular polymeric
substances (EPS) are microbial aggregates
derived from waste sewage sludge accumulated in sewage treatment plants,
which provides natural, renewable, and abundant carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen sources for the development of carbon materials to achieve
the value-added utilization of waste sewage sludge resources. In this
work, a nitrogen-doped graphene oxide (GO)-like material (N-GO) was
simply produced using EPS as starting materials. A facile H2O2 oxidation-assisted method (room temperature) was developed
to synthesize nitrogen-doped GO-like quantum dots (N-GOQDs) with strong
tunable fluorescence from N-GO for the first time. This approach eliminates
the conventional use of toxic chemicals, concentrated acids as well
as expensive equipment, and strict condition requirements, which provides
new insights into the synthesis of N-GO and N-GOQDs. In addition,
this H2O2-assisted method was further demonstrated
to prepare yellow fluorescent GO quantum dots (GOQDs) from GO successfully.
The as-prepared N-GO shows excellent adsorption capacity for removing
organic matters (malachite green, rhodamine B, and methylene blue)
from water in 10 min. The water-soluble N-GOQDs were demonstrated
to be a low toxicity and good biocompatibility fluorescence probe
for bioimaging.