Recycling plastic waste into multifunctional superhydrophobic textiles
Qinglang Ma, Zhiying Wu, Vlad Andrei Neacșu, Sai Zhao, Yu Chai, Hua Zhang
Abstract
The plastic pollution has become one of the top environmental concerns. Substantial effort has been devoted into recycling waste plastic materials in a facile and economical way. In this work, we have successfully recycled a common type of plastic waste, i.e., polystyrene (PS), into value-added functional materials through a cost-effective and facile dip-coating method. The resulted mixture of waste PS and SiO2, referred to as PS/SiO2, coated textile material is superhydrophobic and superoleophilic, showing an excellent resistance towards corrosive solutions (acid, alkaline, and saline), high temperature treatment, and mechanical abrasion. As a proof-of-concept application, the PS/SiO2-coated textile is used to selectively separate oil/water mixtures through either absorption or filtration method. It also exhibits a surface self-cleaning property, which may be used as fabrics for dust-preventing cloths. Our work offers a new strategy to treat the waste for preparation of novel low-cost superhydrophobic materials for various applications.