Hypercrosslinked triazine-phloroglucinol hierarchical porous polymers for the effective removal of organic micropollutants

The development of practical and efficient adsorbents is of great significance to the wastewater treatment. Here, we demonstrated trisphloroglucinol substituted triazine (TPT) as an intriguing building block to construct hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) for the removal of organic micropollutants (OMPs) from water. HCP-TPTs (HCP-TPT-1 and HCP-TPT-2) were facilely obtained via Friedel-Crafts alkylation of TPT with external crosslinkers, and possessed hierarchical porous structure, high degree of functionality, and good hydrophilicity. The embedded TPT skeletons in the porous structure help in effective adsorption of various cationic and nonionic OMPs. The maximum adsorption of HCP-TPT-1 reached 2336 mg g−1 for the rhodamine B, 2239 mg g−1 for the crystal violet, 521 mg g−1 for the 1-naphthylamine, and 500 mg g−1 for the 2-naphthol. In addition, the pseudo-second-order rate of HCP-TPT-1 for rhodamine B is 9.341 g mg−1min−1, which is superior to those adsorbent materials reported so far. Furthermore, HCP-TPT-1 can be easily reused at least seven times without obvious decrease of adsorption efficiency, indicating its potential application in wastewater treatment.