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

Wang, Ying; Ren, Jing-Yi; Zhou, Zhi-Lan; Yao, Rui-Qi; Sun, Xin-Ying; Zeng, Shu-Pei; Han, Gao-Feng; Shi, Hang et al. · Adv Mater · 2026

basic_science · Level V

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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 Co<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub>-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<sup>-2</sup> 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 *OHCH<sub>2</sub>CH<sub>2</sub>OH 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<sup>-2</sup> over 1000 h to continuously produce formate and green hydrogen without performance degradation, showing an industrial perspective of plastic upcycling.