Recycling bone waste and cobalt-wastewater into a highly stable and efficient activator of peroxymonosulfate for dye and HEPES degradation

[Display omitted] In view of the great demand for using sustainable, renewable, and widely available resources to generate catalysts for advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), bio-originated waste materials show great promise as an alternative to state-of-the-art materials that suffer from high cost and scarcity. In this paper, we modified the ostrich bone waste (OBW) with hydrogen peroxide (HP) to produce OBW/HP with excellent chemical and mechanical strength that can in one sweep recover valuable heavy metal ions like Co from industrial wastewater and provide a sustainable catalyst-OBW/HP@CoNP- to activate peroxymonosulfate (PMS) for the degradation of dyes. After treatment of OBW with HP and Co ions, the morphologies of OBW/HP and OBW/HP@CoNP completely changed-porous, fine and flat sheets appeared, and well-dispersed, stable spherical Co nanoparticles of 50−70 nm were generated, respectively. PMS-OBW/HP@CoNP system was able to remove several cationic and anionic dyes such as methylene blue (99.9 %), crystal violet (96.0 %), and congo red (76.0 %) within 120 min. As proof-of-concept applications, we prepared a membrane using a layer of OBW/HP@CoNP and a microreactor by encapsulating a water droplet within OBW/HP@CoNP shell, and found that the materials exhibit rapid kinetics to degrade MB within 30 s. In addition, the degradation of HEPES as a representative organic buffer was also studied for the first time at pH 7.4 and the mechanism of HEPES removal (98 %) was elucidated by LC–MS. Finally, although the preparation of OBW/HP@CoNP does not release toxic and synthetic compounds into the water, shows many advantages as catalyst and membrane- which promising its applications in industrial-scale including low-cost, sustainability, high chemical and mechanical stability, no metal leaching, and superior effectiveness in activating PMS, and recyclability.