Treating Waste with Waste: Recent Advances in Greenhouse Gas Capture Using Waste-Derived Porous Materials

Solid-waste-derived porous materials represent economical and sustainable adsorbents for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), enabling simultaneous industrial emission mitigation and high-value valorization of solid wastes. Nevertheless, comprehensive review articles dedicated to systematically summarizing and discussing such materials are scarce. In this work, four major categories of solid-waste-based adsorbents for greenhouse gas capture are systematically reviewed: porous carbons fabricated via high-temperature carbonization of plastics and biomass; covalently cross-linked porous polymers synthesized under mild conditions; coal-gangue-derived silica-aluminous porous materials; and multifunctional adsorbents produced from diverse agricultural and industrial solid wastes. This review elaborates the synthetic routes, pore-structure regulation strategies, adsorption performances, and inherent limitations of adsorbents derived from various waste feedstocks, covering a broad spectrum of agro-industrial solid wastes including plastics, biomass, coal gangue, gasification slag, rice husks, new-energy-related solid residues, carbide slag, metallurgical slags, mine tailings, and textile-printing-dyeing sludge. Current studies predominantly conduct performance evaluations using an oversimplified simulated flue gas. Insufficient data are available concerning antipoisoning capability and long-term cyclic stability of these adsorbents. Moreover, existing material systems exhibit poor adaptability to waste feedstocks with variable compositions, while pilot-scale demonstrations and full life-cycle assessments are largely absent. These bottlenecks hinder the industrial translation of waste-derived adsorbents. Future research priorities encompass collaborative conversion technologies for mixed solid wastes, structural modification for antipoisoning performance, development of multimechanism composite adsorbents, and mechanistic insights into adsorption processes via combined in situ characterization and theoretical simulation. This Review systematically recapitulates advances in diverse waste-originated adsorbents and offers theoretical references for large-scale industrial deployment of low-cost solid-waste-based CCUS technologies.