Transformation of solid plastic waste to activated carbon fibres for wastewater treatment

In this study, the solid waste plastic was converted into activated carbon fibres through carbonization and chemical activation process. The morphological structure, composition, thermal stability and pore structure of the produced activated carbon materials were characterized. The results revealed that the activation process substantially increases the specific surface area of carbon materials via forming large micropores and mesopores (0.01-0.85 cm3g-1) within average nano size range of 50-100 nm. This study provides an effective means to remove the thymol blue dye via adsorption over activated carbon (ACs) as adsorbent. Batch adsorption of thymol blue was conducted to verify the effect of variety of pH, dye concentrations, contact time, adsorbent dose and temperature. The highest dye removal efficiency (approximately 98.05%) of ACs generated from waste plastic polybags, cups and bottles was observed at 10 ppm of thymol blue dye. The results also exhibited that the dye adsorption was favourable at basic pH (9.0) and increasing amount of adsorbent dosage promotes the dye removal efficiency. The excellent dye removal performance was primarily due to the presence of higher available surface area on the surface of developed carbon fibres. In addition, the current results have given the large overview and useful information of dye removal properties by adsorption isotherm and kinetic measurements. The adsorption kinetics and thermodynamic prospective of formed ACs explored the physical, spontaneous and endothermic adsorption process. The as prepared ACs provided easy regeneration of adsorbents with fast response which further suggests the efficiency of nanoparticles to promote their usage up to 5 consecutive cycles. The current work illustrated that better means to transform solid waste plastic into carbon fibres for providing effective and cheap viable option for the fast removal of thymol blue dye from waste water samples.