The large amount of harmful nickel wastewater produced by electroplating industry has brought great threat to human life. Traditional ways of treating nickel wastewater are expensive, complicated and with high CO2 footprint.Moreover, many nickel sediments originated from the treating process are directly buried or burned, creating second pollution and waste. Therefore,it is imperative to seek low-cost, simpler and greener routes to recycle waste nickel.
Rather than regarding Ni as a disposable waste, the chemicals and petrochemicals industries could instead consider it a huge resource. Herein,Prof. Le He, collaborated with Prof. Wei Sun, Prof. Deren Yang and Prof. Geoffrey Ozin present a strategy for upcycling waste Ni from electroplating wastewater into a photothermal catalyst for converting CO2 to CO.This strategy of upcycling metal waste into functional, catalytic materials offers a multi-pronged approach for clean and renewable energy technologies. The adsorbent used in this work (Fe3O4@SiO2@mSiO2-NH2) was carefully designed, which is also the catalyst support in the reuse application. The inner Fe3O4 core could either make it easier for the collection of the adsorbent from wastewater through magnetic separation, or acting as a heating core in photothermal catalysis. The thin but dense silica in the middle layer could prevent the Fe3O4 core from etching and severe sintering in acidic wastewater and high-temperature catalysis, respectively. The outlayer mesoporous silica provided abundant sites for the grafting of amino groups and thereafter loading of high-dispersion Ni particles. The resulted catalyst from waste Ni produces CO at a rate of 1.9 mol·gNi-1·h-1 (44.1 mmol·gcat-1·h-1), a selectivity close to 100%, and notable long-term stability. This work has provided new insights for the recycle of waste Ni and reducing cost of Ni catalysts. The co-first author, Dake Zhang is from FUNSOM, Soochow University.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33029-x
Link to Prof. He Le's group: http://funsom.suda.edu.cn/7f/a4/c2735a32676/page.htm
Acknowledgement: W.S. thanks the support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFF0502000), National Natural Science Foundation of China (51902287), the U of T-ZJU Joint Seed Fund, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (226-2022-00159, 226- 2022-00200), Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon Based Functional Materials & Devices, Soochow University, and State Key Laboratory of New Textile Materials and Advanced Processing Technologies (FZ2020020). D.Y. acknowledges the financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (61721005). L.H. thanks the support by National Natural Science Foundation of China (52172221 and 51920105005), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20200101), 111 Project, and the Collaborative Innovation Centre of Suzhou Nano Science & Technology. G.A.O. is the Government of Canada Tier 1 Research Chair in Materials Chemistry and Nanochemistry, and he acknowledges the financial support provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The authors thank the support from SSRF (11B) for the XAS experiments.
Editor: Guo Jia