Abstract
As one of the common life garbages, about 4.5 trillion waste cigarette butts are produced and randomly discarded every year due to the addiction to the nicotine and the need of the social intercourse. Such a treatment would result in the waste of the resources and the environmental pollution if they weren’t reasonably recycled in time. Herein, the waste cigarette butts were recycled in form of N-doped carbon powders with high economic value-added via one-step facile carbonization at 800 °C for 2 h in the inert N2 atmosphere. The waste-cigarette-butts-derived black carbon powders were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), N2 adsorption/desorption and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Furthermore, the corresponding electrochemical performances as the anode in lithium ion battery (LIB) were also investigated by galvanostatic charge/discharge, cyclic voltammetry (CV) and alternating current (AC) impedance. The results suggested that the recycled N-doped waste cigarette butts carbon (WCBC) powders consisted of major carbon and minor residual N-containing and O-containing functional groups, and the corresponding specific surface area was about 1285 m2•g-1. Furthermore, and the reversible specific discharge capacity was about 528 mAh•g-1 after 100 cycles at 25 mA•g-1 and about 151 mAh•g-1 even at 2000 mA•g-1 for 2500 cycles. Additionally, full cell performances were also satisfactory, indicating high feasibility. N-doping induced more active sites and higher electronic conductivity, and the resultant synergistic effect may be responsible for the satisfactory electrochemical performances, which offered good inspiration and strategy to develop the green energy and circular economy.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization’s statistics in 2012, there existed about 1.1 billion smokers in the world (Islami et al, 2015)
Considering that the main component of the waste cigarette butt is the organic carbon-rich cellulose, the waste cigarette butts may be reasonably recycled in the form of high economic valueadded carbon powders, which will alleviate the potential environmental pollution and promote the circular economy and the sustainable development
N2 adsorption/desorption isotherms of N-doped waste cigarette butts carbon (WCBC) powders were recorded by static volumetric method, which exhibited the features of type IV curve, as shown in Figure 4A (Thommes et al, 2015; Qin and Chen, 2017)
Summary
According to the World Health Organization’s statistics in 2012, there existed about 1.1 billion smokers in the world (Islami et al, 2015). N-doping can further enhance the electrochemical performances of carbon anode due to the following N-doping effect such as high electrical conductivity, the formation of the structural defects and additional Li-storage active sites (Bulusheva et al, 2011; Song et al, 2014; Zheng et al, 2014).
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