Conversion of Solid Waste into Functional Carbon Materials: A Review

Population explosion and increasing living standard of people resulted in generation of more than a Giga ton of waste per annum worldwide. Hence waste is one of the global problems in 21st century and expected that waste generation continues in future also. Every human activity is left with some waste. There are some major sectors for waste generation, such as manufacturing sector, agricultural sector (in the form of biomass) and municipality waste etc. These wastes are having minimal value or even negative values and creating problem or burden to the environment, human health etc. Therefore, it is utmost important to process and manage those wastes properly. The existing waste management processes involves: recycling, dumping and landfilling, incineration/combustion etc., which are neither sufficient to nullify the adverse effect of the waste nor economic process. These management processes involve human intervention and thereby resulting huge expenses. Nowadays, there is a paradigm shift from management of waste into conversion of waste producing fertilizer, fuel, energy as well as carbon materials etc. In this review, effort is given exclusively to summarize the different processes of waste conversion into functional carbon material such as activated carbon, porous carbon, carbon nanotube, graphene, carbon dot, carbon fibre etc. It has been discussed with the help of illustrative examples from the literatures.