Graphene environmental footprint greatly reduced when derived from biomass waste via flash Joule heating

Graphene is widely applied in many important technologies, with demand projected to grow exponentially. Conventional graphene production approaches that use natural/artificial graphite are expensive and energy and chemical intensive, resulting in a significant environmental footprint. The recent flash Joule heating (FJH) technology that can produce flash graphene (FG) from carbon-rich waste materials has been proposed as a cleaner production process, but the quality of FG made from biomass waste via FJH and the overall sustainability of the process remain unclear. Here we conduct lab-scale experiments to fill these knowledge gaps. We show that biomass waste-derived FG shows excellent thermal and electrical conductivity, and the FJH process results in a more than 10-fold decrease in life-cycle environmental impacts including carbon emissions and freshwater use relative to the conventional approaches. The FJH process is also cost effective, with the biomass waste-derived FG being much cheaper than graphite-based graphene. Our study identifies circular and sustainable opportunities for future graphene production.