Metal-Oxide Heterostructure on Hierarchical Nanoporous Alloy for Highly Efficient Ethylene Glycol Electrooxidation Toward Sustainable PET Upcycling.

Authors

Ying Wang, Jing-Yi Ren, Zhi-Lan Zhou, Rui-Qi Yao, Xin-Ying Sun, Shu-Pei Zeng, Gao-Feng Han, Hang Shi, Tong-Hui Wang, Zi Wen, Xing-You Lang, Qing Jiang

Published in

Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.). Pages e74377. Jul 28, 2026. Epub Jul 28, 2026.

Abstract

Renewable electricity-driven polyethylene terephthalate (PET) hydrolysate electrolysis is a sustainable plastic upcycling technique to produce valuable chemicals, but it usually undergoes insufficient efficiency and selectivity to complicate product separation processes. Here we report nonprecious Co₃O₄-CuO heterostructure in-situ integrated on CuCo alloy skeleton as an efficient electrocatalyst to selectively mediate electrooxidation of ethylene glycol in PET hydrolysate to formate and hydrogen for simple and cost-effective monomer separation. It exhibits exceptional activity (∼930 mA cm^-2 at 1.5 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode) and selectivity (>98 %) as a result of the construction of Co─O─Cu linked CoOOH─CuO multiple active regions for *OH and *OHCH₂CH₂OH co-adsorption, which enables the formation of interfacial hydrogen-bond coordination to accelerate C─H and C─C bond cleavage. This electrocatalyst is successfully applied in PET hydrolysate electrolyser for stable operation at ∼500 mA cm^-2 over 1000 h to continuously produce formate and green hydrogen without performance degradation, showing an industrial perspective of plastic upcycling.

PMID:
42522319
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Jul 2026.

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