With increasing population and limited resources, a potential route for improving sustainability is increased reuse of waste materials. By re-looking at wastes, interesting properties and multifunctionalities can be discovered in materials previously explored. Despite years of research on bio-compatible fish scales, there is limited study on the fluorescence property of this abundant waste material. Controlled denaturation of collagen and introduction of defects can serve as a means to transform the fluorescence property of these fish scale wastes while providing more adsorption sites for pollutant removal, turning multifunctional fish scales into a natural steganographic material for transmitting text and images at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels and effectively removing Rhodamine B pollutants (91 % removal) within a short contact time (10 minutes). Our work offers a glimpse into the realm of engineering defects-induced fluorescence in natural material with potential as bio-compatible fluorescence probes while encouraging multidimensional applicability to be established in otherwise overlooked waste resources.
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