Recycling plastic waste into multifunctional superhydrophobic textiles

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.