Construction of a metallic silver nanoparticle-decorated bismuth oxybromide-based composite material as a readily recyclable photocatalyst

As a consequence of rapid industrialization, there has been a gradual increase in the accumulation of organic pollutants in the aquatic environment, the removal of which has become an urgent problem. In this regard, photocatalysis is considered a sustainable and efficient sewage treatment technology. In this study, an efficiently recyclable composite material for photodegrading organic pollutants was fabricated by anchoring metallic silver nanoparticle-decorated bismuth oxybromide nanosheet (BiOBr) arrays on carboxymethyl cotton fabric. Systematic investigations of the structure and morphology, photocatalytic ability, and antibacterial properties of the generated Ag/BiOBr-carboxymethyl cotton fabric (Ag/BiOBr-CCF) revealed that the BiOBr nanosheets (thickness of ∼40 nm and a size of ∼1 μm in the other two dimensions) were evenly and stably anchored to the carboxymethyl cotton by uniformly distributed metallic Ag nanoparticles (10–20 nm in diameter). Furthermore, the Ag/BiOBr-CCF material can effectively photodegrade >99% of rhodamine B and the herbicide isoproturon in response to irradiation with visible light (λ > 400 nm), and that Ag/BiOBr-CCF has good structural stability and can be readily recycled without additional treatment. The metallic Ag nanoparticles were also demonstrated to confer excellent antibacterial properties to the Ag/BiOBr-CCF, thereby protecting the cotton fabric from microbial degradation. Collectively, the observations indicate that this composite material would be eminently applicable as a readily recyclable photocatalyst for environmental remediation.