Waste Office Papers as a Cellulosic Material Reservoir to Derive Highly Porous Activated Carbon for Solid-State Electrochemical Capacitor

The conversion of biowaste to activated carbon (AC) for supercapacitor applications is recently gaining attention due to its extraordinary high specific surface area (SSA), hierarchical pore size distribution, and very good conductivity. Therefore, in this work, we have utilized waste office papers as a precursor to synthesize highly porous carbon to be used as an electrode material for supercapacitors. The sub-nanometre pores in as-synthesized office paper waste-derived activated carbon (OPDAC) material, facilitate easy flow of ions and surprisingly increase the specific capacitance up to 237 F/g at a current density of 1 A/g. Moreover, an all-solid-state symmetric supercapacitor using OPDAC electrodes delivers an ultrahigh energy density of 31 Wh/kg at a power density of 380 W/kg along with a long cycle life of 95% after 3000 charge-discharge cycles. Hence, these remarkable results pave the path for the usage of different biowastes for varying energy storage applications.