degradation of benzene using solar light-driven zno-c3n4/r-pet floating photocatalyst

Drinking bottles fill up our landfills and burying and throwing them away hurts the environment. in this paper, drinking pet bottle as the most commonly used polymer in daily life is recycled (r-pet) and used as support of c3n4-zno photocatalyst. floating state of r-pet makes the final photocatalyst a buoyant material. thus, it will be capable of photodegradation of floating insolvable organic pollutants like benzene. adsorption and photodegradation of benzene was performed using c3n4-zno/r-pet photocatalyst. this photocatalyst showed low adsorption of benzene. but kinetic studies showed that the zno-c3n4/r-pet follows a first order reaction with high rate constant of 0.046 1/s and 97% of benzene photodegradation after 3h of irradiation of simulated solar light. tem and uv-vis drs confirmed high interaction between c3n4, zno and r-pet and 3.05 ev band gap for this sample. the photocatalytic evaluation of this sample under solar light showed complete photodegradation of benzene that was because higher intensity of sunlight compared to the simulated lamps. in addition, effect of wind blowing and aeration that provides more o2 should be considered. the activity of c3n4-zno/r-pet photocatalyst did not change significantly after successive four runs showing good stability of this sample. crystallite phases of zno, c3n4 and r-pet remained constant after use according to xrd.