A team of scientists from India have used tea and banana waste to prepare non-toxic activated carbon.
This is useful in industrial pollution control, water purification, food and beverage processing, and odour removal.
The newly developed process avoids using any toxic agent for synthesizing activated carbon, thus making the product cost-effective and non-toxic.
The structure of tea was beneficial for conversion to high-quality activated carbon, but it involves using solid acid and bases, which is toxic; hence a non-toxic method of conversion was needed.