Waste mop cloth recycling enables rapid, high-throughput removal of viscous winter oil spills

Cleaning up viscous crude oil spills rapidly and cost-effectively is a global challenge, especially in Arctic or cold marine environments. Self-heating aerogels have been explored for oil spill remediation, but their practical application is hindered by energy-intensive fabrication, structural fragility, and poor mechanical durability. Significantly, oil spills recovery in cold environments encompasses two additional challenges: a sharp increase in oil viscosity and rapid thermal dissipation. Herein, we demonstrate that repurposing mop cloth waste into functional oil sorbents offers a waste-upcycling strategy to alleviate energy and cost barriers in oil spill remediation. This study presents an approach by: (1) Repurposing waste textiles into high-performance absorbents through a simple dip-coating method, achieving excellent cyclic absorption-squeezing for viscous oils in cold marine conditions; (2) Developing a passive oil recovery system that eliminates energy-intensive pumping and addresses critical challenge of cold-environment crude oil recovery with a stable recovery rate of 1600.36 kg m^-2 h^-1, representing a substantial improvement in recovery efficiency compared with conventional systems. This prepared material also exhibit excellent anti-icing and photothermal de-icing performance, which offers a sustainable route for cold-environment oil recovery, highlighting the potential of waste-derived functional materials for complex environmental challenges.