The recyclability of sorbents has also become an important criterion for oil spill cleanup applications. Benefited from the intrinsic fire-resistant property of macro/mesoporous carbon
monolith, direct combustion of the oil-fouled carbon monolith in air can effectively regenerate the carbon monolith.Thus, the recyclability tests are performed from various organic liquids to evaluate the regeneration capacity of asmade carbon monolith (Fig. 10). For example, C-1000 sample fouled with ethanol was burned for recycle use, and no structural damage was found on C-1000 (the inset in Fig. 10 andMovie S5). After five absorption-combustion cycles, the standard
deviation of absorption capacity maintained almost 5.5 wt% for all organic liquids, and less than 1 wt% of residual weight remained in C-1000 sample after each cycle, indicating a relatively stable recyclable performance of as-made carbon monolith. The slightly change of the absorption capacity for each cycle may be ascribed to the residual weight of organic liquid remained in C-1000 sample during incomplete combustion process. The results clearly suggest the excellent recyclability of the carbon monolith when used as a sorbent for oil–water separation. Table S1 shows the comparison of macro/mesoporous carbon monolith with several typical carbonbased sorbents reported before. Although the absorption capacity of the resultant macro/mesoporous carbon monolithis still lower than those of graphene sponge, carbonnanotube, carbonaceous fiber and graphene microsphere [27–
32], the former has special outstanding features including
low-cost and available raw materials, good recyclability, as
well as simple fabrication method. Most importantly, the
mass production of the macro/mesoporous carbon monolith
has practical applications.