A green designed copper-resin composite for highly efficient catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol

Abstract 4-Nitrophenol (4-NP) has a significant toxic effect on human health and environment, so it is urgent to find out an effective method to treat the pollutant. In this work, a green catalyst resin-stabilized copper nanocomposites were synthesized to study the catalytic reduction performance of 4-NP. The 13% Cu-D001 resin (D001 resin stabilized 13% of copper nanocomposites) showed high catalytic activity in the reduction of 4-NP to 4-aminophenol (4-AP). The pseudo-first-order kinetic constant reached 0.0132 min−1. The activation energy for the reduction of 13% Cu-D001 resin was 12.48 kJ/mol, which was lower than that of silver nanoshell-coated resin (24.08 kJ/mol). The high catalytic property of 13% Cu-D001 resin strongly depended on the oxidation state of copper nanocomposites supported on the resin. The catalyst also showed high reusability and the catalytic conversion rate still reached 80% in the sixth cycle. In this study, a promising catalyst was introduced for the practical reduction of 4-NP in wastewater.