Co-pyrolysis of cyanobacteria and plastics to synthesize porous carbon and its application in methylene blue adsorption

Abstract Cyanobacteria and plastics, as the two major problems of the water environment crisis, need to be solved urgently. In particular, there is no reasonable method for simultaneously treating these wastes and recovering useful resources from them. Therefore, the mixture of cyanobacteria and polypropylene (PP) plastics is directly pyrolyzed at different activation conditions to synthesize the composite carbon (CPC) materials, which have excellent performance in water contaminant removal. The result indicates that the added PP is beneficial to improve the properties of CPC material, increasing its specific surface area and pore volume (up to 2811 m2/g and 1.992 cm3/g, respectively). The application performance of CPC materials is mainly determined by the surface area and pore volume. Therefore, the CPC materials exhibit a higher methylene blue (MB) adsorption (maximum 490 mg/g). This paper provides a new strategy for recycling wastes from water environment and new ideas for synthesizing high-performance composite materials.