Salt-templated transformation of waste plastics into single-atom catalysts for environmental and energy applications
Files
(Published version)
Date
2025
Authors
Ren, S.
Xu, X.
Hu, K.
Zhong, S.
Gao, Y.
Johannessen, B.
Ren, W.
Zhou, H.
Zhu, Z.-S.
Chen, Y.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Nature Communications, 2025; 16(1):8194-1-8194-10
Statement of Responsibility
Shiying Ren, Xin Xu, Kunsheng Hu, Shuang Zhong, Yingjie Gao, Bernt Johannessen, Wei Ren, Hongyu Zhou, Zhong-Shuai Zhu, Yidi Chen, Xiaoguang Duan, Shaobin Wang
Conference Name
Abstract
Upcycling plastic waste into single-atom catalysts (SACs) not only offers a sustainable solution for plastic waste management but also yields valuable functional materials for catalytic applications. Here, we report a simple and scalable method to transform various types of plastics, including polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyethylene terephthalate, polyvinyl chloride, and their mixtures, into a diversity of porous SACs with different coordination chemistry and their excellent applications in a variety of catalytic reactions. Lamellar transition metal chloride salts (Ni, Fe, Co, Mn, and Cu) are employed as a template and catalyst for confined carbonization of plastics into layered SACs. An appropriate plastic-to-salt ratio is the key factor for preventing metal agglomeration during SAC synthesis. The SACs demonstrate exceptional catalytic activity in oxidative degradation of a range of persistent organic pollutants for water treatment and excel in electrocatalytic systems such as oxygen/nitrogen reduction reactions and lithium-sulfur batteries. This technique provides a versatile, scalable, and efficient strategy for upcycling solid wastes into high-performance materials for environmental and energy catalysis.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Corrected by: Author Correction: Salt-templated transformation of waste plastics into single-atom catalysts for environmental and energy applications, in Nature Communications volume 16, Article number: 8766 (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-64721-3. In the version of this article initially published, in Fig. 2b, the HAADF-STEM image of CuSA-PE was mistakenly placed. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
Access Status
Rights
© The Author(s) 2025, corrected publication 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.