Facile fabrication of highly flexible and floatable Cu2O/rGO on Vietnamese traditional paper toward high-performance solar-light-driven photocatalytic degradation of ciprofloxacin antibiotic

In this work, we successfully demonstrated the facile fabrication of highly flexible and floatable Cu2O/rGO on Vietnamese traditional paper (VTP) for the solar-light-driven photocatalytic degradation of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. The catalyst membrane was prepared by the green reduction of both Cu(OH)2 to Cu2O nanoparticles and graphene oxide to reduced graphene oxide. VTP has a fibrous structure with tiny fibers connected like a spider web and multiple layers in the form of a multidimensional array, which functions as a flexible and highly porous supporter to the catalyst. Moreover, the microfibrillated cellulose of VTP acts as micro-capillaries to drag ciprofloxacin (CIP) close to the active sites on the Cu2O/rGO/VTP surface, which improves the adsorption capacity and photocatalytic efficiency of ciprofloxacin. The adsorption process is best described by the pseudo-first-order and Freundlich models. The maximum photodegradation of CIP by the catalyst is more than 80% attained after 1.5 h under solar light irradiation with a fixed CIP concentration of 10 mg L−1. The catalyst membrane exhibited good reusability of up to 5 cycles.