Morphological modification and charge carrier separation in tin oxide nanomaterials towards improved photocatalytic dye degradation: Enzyme coupling – An effective way

•Preparation of vermiwash powered tin oxide as enzyme-coupled photocatalyst for the first time.•Enzymes inheritance by prepared nanoproducts from vermiwash.•Correlation of photocatalytic efficiency improvement with SEM, TEM, XRD, FT-IR and Enzyme studies. This paper reports the preparation of enzyme-coupled tin oxide (SnO2) nanomaterial using vermiwash and its photocatalytic dye decomposing efficiency, for the first time. The vermiwash used in the precursor solution was varied as 10, 20, 100 and 200 mL. It is found that the vermiwash powered nanoproducts inherit enzymes of vermiwash like phosphatase, urease, amylase and protease which act as co-catalysts to improve the efficiency. The mechanism behind the improved photocatalytic activity of the enzyme-coupled nanomaterial has been illustrated. The vermiwash-activated SnO2 nanopowders were also characterized using XRD, SEM, TEM, BET, UV–vis absorption and FT-IR. These results are correlated with the photocatalytic degradation abilities of the samples.