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[Display omitted] • A green and high-yield route to recycle waste masks into CNTs/Ni hybrids. • The yield of carbon as high as 64.4 g/100 g waste masks. • The Ni(OH) 2 /NiCl 2 as universal catalysts to catalytic carbonization waste masks form different environments. • Superior microwave absorption performances with reflection loss of -56.3 dB and absorption bandwidth of 4.3 GHz. With the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, a tremendous amount of face masks have been consumed and discarded, resulting in serious environment pollution and infectious hazards. Herein a green and high-yield route has been developed to recycle waste masks (WMs) into CNTs/Ni hybrids via catalytic carbonization. Our results exhibited that the yield of carbon was as high as 64.4 g/100 g WMs. Furthermore, the as-fabricated CNTs/Ni hybrids were applied for microwave absorption, which displayed superior performances, including a strong reflection loss of -56.3 dB and an absorption bandwidth of 4.3 GHz with absorber thickness of only 2.0 mm. The mechanism was mainly ascribed to the favorable synergistic effects of CNTs and Ni on conduction and magnetic losses, dipolar polarization, interfacial polarization and impedance matching. Thus, this work provides an environmentally friendly, scalable and cost-effective strategy for recycling waste masks into high-valuable carbon nanomaterials, and exploits their potential application for microwave absorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]