A sustainable route for producing reduced graphene oxide nanosheets from recycled plastic waste for high-performance supercapacitor applications

Abstract

Among the environmental issues, plastic waste is one of the most significant problems, and thus, searching for ways to solve it is critical. In the present work, a green process is proposed for synthesizing RGO nanosheets from recycled plastic waste for efficient supercapacitor applications. The suggested approach consists of the transformation of plastic waste into GO using a direct and reproducible strategy and then the transformation of GO to RGO via an eco-friendly reducing agent. The synthesized RGO nanosheets possessed desirable electrochemical characteristics such as a specific capacitance of 104[Formula: see text]F/g at 0.5[Formula: see text]A/g, 90% capacitance retention after 5000 cycles, and good rate capability. The RGO nanosheets were further employed as electrode materials for the supercapacitor devices which has been evidenced with high energy density and power density. Physical properties have been characterized by XRD, Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscope have clearly observed the structure and the morphology of Graphene nanosheets has been established. The electrochemical properties of RGO have been examined and demonstrated to be regular. The proposed structure exhibits a nearly rectangular shape within the range of the potential window, conforming to the standard characteristics of an ideal capacitor. The findings of this study represent a viable and techno-economically feasible strategy to address the global issue of plastic waste and generate high-value graphene materials for energy storage technologies.