Converting Polyvinyl Chloride Plastic Wastes to Carbonaceous Materials via Room-Temperature Dehalogenation for High-Performance Supercapacitor - Carbon4Energy

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics are widely applicable in our daily life, however, their over uses and extremely high toughness to be recycled/disposed have caused serious challenges to our environment. In this study, we proposed an effective and green method to convert PVC plastics to carbonaceous materials via KOH-assisted room-temperature dehalogenation, along with the formation of clean by-products of KCl and H2O.Thereof, high-quality porous carbon materials could be obtainable through performing simple annealing on the abovementioned carbonaceous materials. The as-resulted carbon materials derived from PVC plastics were fabricated into electrodes for supercapacitor application. Remarkably, the porous carbon material derived from plastic wrap (PW-C) exhibited excellent performance for aqueous symmetric supercapacitor. The specific capacitance reached up to 399 F g-1 and 363 F g-1 (at 1.0 A g-1) in 6.0 mol L-1 KOH and 1.0 mol L-1 H2SO4 electrolytes, respectively. Meanwhile, PW-C performed very good rate capability and cycling stability in both electrolytes. Therefore, our developed method is capable of treating PVC plastic wastes safely and efficiently and converting them into valued-added porous carbon electrode materials, which may attract very soon practical implantations.