Supporting silver on ZnCo-ZIFs as an efficient heterogeneous catalyst for oxytetracycline antibiotic removal

Abstract

Abstract Water pollution by antibiotic residues negatively affects the ecosystem and seriously threatens public health. Therefore, finding a sustainable technology to remove antibiotics from water resources is extremely necessary. This work synthesized bimetallic Zn-Co based zeolite imidazolate frameworks (ZnCo-ZIFs) and integrated them with Ag via the impregnation method to obtain Ag/ZnCo-ZIFs. This material demonstrated a remarkable capability to remove oxytetracycline (OTC). The results showed that it could remove 94% OTC at an initial concentration of 30 mg.L−1 using H2O2 concentration of 0.015 mol.L−1, Ag/ZnCo-ZIFs catalyst dose of 400 mg.L−1 at room temperature for 40 min. Besides, the catalyst could be reused and recycled after four times. This promises that Ag/ZnCo-ZIFs could be approached as a heterogeneous catalytic material for removing antibiotics from aquatic environments.