Utilizing Household Organic Waste as a Precursor for Carbon Nanomaterial Production: Challenges and Outlook for Sustainable Waste Management

Abstract

Household organic waste accumulates daily, posing a significant environmental issue due to inadequate treatments and insufficient disposals. The negative impacts include air and water pollutions, ecosystem damage, and worsening of human health. Carbon nanomaterials (CNMs) are emerging as an innovative solution with an easy manufacturing process and wide applications in various fields. Utilizing household organic waste as a precursor for CNMs opens up opportunities to create useful and sustainable products, as well as reducing the amount of organic waste. The CNMs are produced in a two-step of low heating (TSLH) method using an oven and microwave. The CNMs are then characterized using a particle size analyser (PSA) to determine their particle size distributions. The PSA test results show that the dominant particle size distribution of the CNMs is 651 nm. Furthermore, the particle size distribution is found to be 90.3 nm with a percentage of 6.4%, which is in accordance with the nanoparticle size requirement (below 100 nm). The treatment of the organic waste into CNMs takes 5 to 7 days with 99.66% reduction of the waste. The challenges here are detected to be the sorting and filtering durations of the organic waste. These findings open opportunities for further research to understand the impact and potential applications of the resulting nano-sized CNMs in the context of sustainable household organic waste management and technology.