Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12pt"><span style="text-justify:inter-ideograph"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The use of excessive antibiotics in modern livestock farming to meet the demand of the increasing global population has taken a serious toll on our environment. To treat various kinds of antibiotics and other organic matters in the waste water stream, our group and others are actively developing new methods and catalyst for advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). Specifically, we are developing cobalt borate (CoBi) as a single-component, highly effective photocatalyst in activating hydrogen peroxide (H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub>) and potassium monooxypersulfate (PMS) for the degradation of organic pollutants under simulated solar light irradiation. Inspired by the peculiar electrocatalytic activity of metal borates/borides, we investigated the photocatalytic activity of CoBi in a Fenton and Fenton-like reaction for the production of OH radical and sulfate radical, respectively. A semicrystalline CoBi was prepared via a simple thermal annealing of a mixture of Co3O4 nanoparticles (50 nm) and boric acid at 800°C for 12 hrs. Under neutral pH condition, the catalyst showed complete degradation of the 10 ppm of methylene blue (MB) within 50 minutes under simulated solar irradiation. Additionally, we also found that CoBi is effective in activating PMS in the degradation of tetracycline (TC), a model compound for antibiotics. CoBi showed more than 90% degradation efficiency of TC under the simulated solar radiation within 15 mins. In view of the synthetic simplicity, we believed that metal borate materials could potentially be a sustainable, and highly effective catalyst for AOPs in the degradation of real wastewater.</span></span></span></p>