To provide a low-cost photocatalyst and new methodology for the utilization of waste rice noodle (WRN), a carbon quantum dots/zinc oxide (CQDs/ZnO) composite using WRN as the raw material was synthesized and characterized. The CQDs/ZnO composite based on WRN exhibited a highly efficient photocatalytic degradation effect on various organic pollutants and could be a good alternative for commercial ZnO. For methylene blue, the CQDs/ZnO composite showed a good degradation rate of 99.58% within 40 min, a high degradation rate constant of 0.2630 min-1, and could be recycled and reused for ten photocatalytic cycles without an appreciable decrease in the degradation effect, which was much better than that of commercial ZnO. The resulting CQDs/ZnO composite also displayed a nice photocatalytic degradation effect on other common organic pollutants, such as malachite green, methyl violet, basic fuchsin, rhodamine B, aniline and tetracycline. In particular, it could achieve excellent photocatalytic degradation on malachite green with an extremely high degradation rate constant of 1.9260 min-1. Besides, the CQDs/ZnO composite could also be used to control the pollution of tetracycline or aniline. The introduction of CQDs based on WRN to ZnO resulted in efficient electron-hole pair separation and enabled more photogenerated electrons to reduce O2 and more photogenerated holes to oxidize H2O, which caused stronger abilities in producing radicals (such as O2˙- and ˙OH) and a better photocatalytic degradation effect to organic pollutants.
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