Trash to treasure: converting plastic waste into a useful graphene foil

Abstract

Recycling of plastic waste has commercial value and practical significance for both environmental safety and recovery of resources. To realize trash recycling, a cheap, simple, and safe solid-state chemical vapor deposition method has been developed to convert a series of daily plastic wastes to a high quality graphene foil (GF) at a large scale. The GF possesses a high electrical conductivity of 3824 S·cm, which is much higher than that of the conventional free-standing graphene film treated at an extremely high temperature of 2200-2500 °C. Further, the GF can act as various flexible elements such as a free-standing electrode in a foldable lithium-ion battery, which shows stable electrochemical performances. On the other hand, it presents a fast and ultra low-voltage responsivity to be used as a flexible electrothermal heater, which generates a temperature of up to 322.6 °C at a low input voltage of only 5 V. The convenient trash-to-treasure conversion of plastics to GF provides a unique pathway for waste recycling and opens new application possibilities of graphene in various fields.

Solid waste-derived carbon nanomaterials for supercapacitor applications: a recent overview

“…Thus, treated solid waste processed out at 1050 o C for 2 hours in tube furnace just to remove the presence of oxidic functionalities, finally annealing process resulted few layered graphene. Scan rates of gases may be one of the factors behind good graphitization of solid waste materials at such high temperature [89].…”

High Rate Production of Clean Water Based on the Combined Photo‐Electro‐Thermal Effect of Graphene Architecture

“…Preparation of GF and GO : GF with a thickness of 4 µm was prepared via chemical vapor deposition as reported in the previous papers . GO was prepared from natural graphite power via acid‐oxidation process …”

“…Thus, the combined photo‐electro‐thermal effect possesses considerably large potential to achieve higher water production rate. In general, the GF prepared by chemical vapor deposition has the most outstanding electrothermal effect when compared with other conductive carbon‐based films (Figures S9–S11, Supporting Information) such as rGO, carbon cloth, and carbon paper.…”

Plastic recycling and their use as raw material for the synthesis of carbonaceous materials

“…Considering this, several strategies have been proposed using the CVD method to prepare different types of graphene from plastic waste, these being polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) [ 99 ]. However, the yield of graphene is low, and the size of the graphene is limited by the size of the metal substrate.…”