Utilization of cigarette butt waste as functional carbon precursor for supercapacitors and adsorbents

Cigarette butts, as a non-biodegradable waste, is ubiquitous in our surrounding environment. It is mainly composed of cellulose acetate, which has considerable potential use value. Therefore, it is necessary to find an appropriate method to treat this waste and recover the useful resources. In this paper, the cigarette butts were directly pyrolyzed at different activation conditions to prepare the cigarette-derived functional carbon (CDFC) materials, which have bifunctional applications in supercapacitors and water contaminant removal. The result indicated that the properties of as-prepared CDFC materials were strongly affect by the activation conditions, such as pyrolysis temperatures, activator and N dopant (urea) contents. In addition, the N-doped CDFC material exhibited a high specific surface area (2068 m(2)/g) and a specific capacitance of 199 F/g at 1 A/g in 6 M KOH electrolyte. The capacitance retention of this material was close to 100% after 10,000 cycles at 10 A/g. For water remediation, the N-doped CDFC material also showed high ability on roxarsone adsorption (maximum 697 mg/g). Therefore, this paper provides new strategies for the resource utilization of common waste and synthesis of high-performance functional carbon material. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.