A sustainable carbon aerogel from waste paper with exceptional performance for antibiotics removal from water

In this work, a sustainable 3D carbon aerogel (AO-WPC) is prepared from waste paper (WP), and used for efficient antibiotics removal from water. The AO-WPC aerogel shows good mechanical property and can recover after 100th of 30 % compression strain. The specific surface area of AO-WPC aerogel is up to 654.58 m²/g. More importantly, this aerogel reveals proper pore size distribution, including micro sized macropores between carbon fibers and intrinsic nano scale mesopores (11.86 nm), which is conducive to remove antibiotics from water. Taking tetracycline (Tc) as an example, the maximum adsorption capacity and adsorption rate of AO-WPC for Tc are as high as 384.6 mg/g and 0.510 g/(mg‧min), respectively, which exhibits significant advantages over most of the recent absorbents, and the adsorption toward Tc reveals good resistance to various environmental factors, including pH, various ions, and dissolved organic matter (DOM). Moreover, good thermal stability enables the AO-WPC aerogel to be regenerated through simple burning, and the adsorption capacity of Tc only decreases by 10.4 % after 10 cycles. Mechanism research shows that hydrogen bonding and π-π electron-donor-acceptor (EDA) interaction play the important role in the adsorption. The excellent mechanical property and adsorption performance imply good practical prospect of the AO-WPC aerogel.