Porous carbons prepared from a novel hard wood composite waste for effective adsorption of Pb(ii) and Cd(ii) ions.

In our previous investigations, a hard wood composite (HWC) was formulated by adding rice straw, as a filler to the recycled polystyrene foam waste at mass ratio (50/50) at 170 °C and pressed under 40 kPa. Here, the disposed HWC product as a model scrap was applied for production of porous carbons enclosed with graphene sheets. To attain this approach, HWC was hydrothermally carbonized (S1) followed by either post-heat treatment (S2) or potassium hydroxide (KOH, S3) activation at 750 °C for 2 hours.