Pulsed electrosynthesis of glycolic acid through polyethylene terephthalate upcycling over a mesoporous PdCu catalyst

Abstract Electrocatalytic upcycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics offers a promising and sustainable route that not only addresses serious waste pollution but also produces high value-added chemicals. Despite some important achievements, their activity and selectivity have remarkably been slower than needed. In this work, pulsed electrocatalysis was employed to engineer chemisorption properties on a lamellar mesoporous PdCu (LM-PdCu) catalyst, which delivered superior activity and stability for selective electrosynthesis of high value-added glycolic acid (GA) from PET upcycling under ambient conditions. LM-PdCu was synthesized by in situ nucleation and attachment strategy along assembled lamellar templates, whose stacked morphology and lamellar mesoporous structure kinetically accelerated selective desorption of GA and exposed fresh active sites of metal catalysts for continuous electrocatalysis at pulsed mode. This strategy thus delivered impressive GA Faraday efficiency of > 92% in wide potential windows, high yield rate of reaching 0.475 mmol cm–2 h–1, and excellent cycling stability of exceeding 20 cycles for electrocatalytic PET upcycling, outperforming previously reported values. Moreover, pulsed electrocatalysis disclosed good electrocatalytic performance for scaled-up GA electrosynthesis from real bottle waste plastics. This work provides a sustainable and highly potential route for selective electrosynthesis of value-added chemicals from upcycling of various waste feedstocks.