Generation of H2O2 via simultaneous treatment of cotton and organic pollutants in textile wastewater

The textile industry is essential for human life but generates significant amounts of waste cotton and alkaline dye wastewater. These pollutants are difficult to separate and treat, causing numerous environmental issues. Traditional methods struggle to deal with the combined pollution without additives. In this study, we developed a simple hydrothermal process to convert waste cotton and dye wastewater into a non-metal catalyst. This catalyst can degrade dyes using oxygen from the air. Remarkably, it produces a substantial amount of H2O2 after degrading the dyes. This demonstrates that we utilized waste cotton present in textile wastewater as a catalyst precursor and abundant oxygen as an oxidant to convert dye wastewater into valuable H2O2. We also used commercially available cotton cloth as a raw material and achieved good results. Under the optimized conditions, 96 % of the dye was degraded within 4 h, generating 252 mu M of H2O2 simultaneously. Additionally, the catalysts performed better under alkaline conditions, with the dye degradation rate increasing by 33 % compared to neutral conditions. This is ideal for alkaline textile mill wastewater. Therefore, our work provides a novel method for the treatment of cotton waste and dyes in textile mills and has broad application prospects.