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The treatment of expired medical injections has always been a thorny environmental concern due to high liquid mobility and crispy glass bottle package. For this purpose, in this work, expired vitamin B1 (VB1) injections were recycled via the hydrothermal carbonization pelletizing and the following pyrolysis for the first time. The resultant VB1-derived N-doped carbon (VBNC) appeared as the morphology of regular micro-spheres with the mean diameter of 3.4 ± 0.7 μm. Furthermore, as the anode-active material in lithium ion battery (LIB), it also delivered high initial discharge capacity of 731 mAh g−1 at 0.025 A g−1 and the reversible discharge capacities of 358, 292, 203 and 118 mAh g−1 even at 0.5 A g−1, 1 A g−1, 2 A g−1 and 4 A g−1 for 500 cycles. Regular micro-spherical morphology and N-doping effect may jointly contribute into the satisfactory electrochemical performances, indicating high feasibility for LIB anode and offering a good strategy to recycle expired waste VB1 injections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waste antibiotics into the natural environment are the large challenges to the environmental protection and the human health, and the unreasonable disposal of the expired antibiotics is a major pollution source. Herein, to achieve the innocent treatment and the resource recovery, the expired tetracycline was tried to be reutilized as the electrode active material in lithium ion battery (LIB) for the first time. The micro-structure and element component of the expired tetracycline were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Furthermore, the corresponding electrochemical performances were also investigated by galvanostatic charge/discharge and cyclic voltammetry (CV). To be satisfactory, the expired-tetracycline-based electrode delivered the initial specific discharge capacity of 371.6 mAh/g and the reversible specific capacity of 304.1 mAh/g after 200 cycles. The decent results will not only offer an effective strategy to recycle the expired tetracycline, but also shed a new light on the cyclic economy and the sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide applications of metal Cu inevitably resulted in a large quantity of waste Cu materials. In order to recover the useful Cu under the mild conditions and reduce the environmental emission, waste Cu scraps were recycled in the form of CuCl powders with high economic value added (EVA) via the facile hydrothermal route. The recycled CuCl powders were characterized in terms of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results suggested that the recycled CuCl powders consisted of many regular tetrahedron-like micro-particles. Furthermore, in order to reduce the cost of lithium ion battery (LIB) anode and build the connection of waste Cu scraps and LIB, the recycled CuCl powders were evaluated as the anode active material of LIB. As expected, the reversible discharge capacity was about 171.8 mAh/g at 2.0 C even after 50 cycles, implying the satisfactory cycle stability. Clearly, the satisfactory results may open a new avenue to develop the circular economy and the sustainable energy industry, which would be very important in terms of both the resource recovery and the environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]