LAUSR

Abstract In leather industry, it is a big challenge to deal with tons of waste leathers, especially those containing chromium. On the other hand, non-precious cost-effective hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts are of considerable demands for environmentally-friendly energy production. Herein, in order to meet these two challenges, we creatively utilized chromium-containing waste leathers to fabricate high performance non-precious HER catalysts. Leather consists of collagen bundles; high temperature annealing of Cr-containing waste leather results in the formation of (Cr, N)-co-doped carbon cloth (CNCC). Molybdenum carbide nanoparticles can be simultaneously coupled onto CNCC (Mo2C@CNCC) by loading Mo oxyanions on waste leather through wet impregnation before annealing. The resulted Mo2C@CNCC is self-supported and can be directly applied as HER electrode, which exhibits outstanding electrocatalytic HER performances in alkaline media with low overpotential (113 mV at 10 mA/cm2) and long-term stability (more than 70 h). The existence of Cr in waste leather is unbeneficial for waste leather disposition, but plays an important role to enhance the HER performances. This simple “changing harm for the treasure” route provides a new green concept for dealing with waste leather and creating high performance electrocatalysts.