Metal-Oxide Heterostructure on Hierarchical Nanoporous Alloy for Highly Efficient Ethylene Glycol Electrooxidation...

Renewable electricity-driven polyethylene terephthalate (PET) hydrolysate electrolysis is a sustainable plastic upcycling technique to produce valuable chemicals, but it usually undergoes insufficient efficiency and selectivity to complicate product separation processes. Here we report nonprecious Co₃O₄-CuO heterostructure in-situ integrated on CuCo alloy skeleton as an efficient electrocatalyst to selectively mediate electrooxidation of ethylene glycol in PET hydrolysate to formate and hydrogen for simple and cost-effective monomer separation. It exhibits exceptional activity (∼930 mA cm^-2 at 1.5 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode) and selectivity (>98 %) as a result of the construction of Co─O─Cu linked CoOOH─CuO multiple active regions for *OH and *OHCH₂CH₂OH co-adsorption, which enables the formation of interfacial hydrogen-bond coordination to accelerate C─H and C─C bond cleavage. This electrocatalyst is successfully applied in PET hydrolysate electrolyser for stable operation at ∼500 mA cm^-2 over 1000 h to continuously produce formate and green hydrogen without performance degradation, showing an industrial perspective of plastic upcycling.