Green energy generation is an indispensable task to concurrently resolve fossil fuel depletion and environmental issues to align with the global goals of achieving carbon neutrality. Photocatalysis, a process that transforms solar energy into clean fuels through a photocatalyst, represents a felicitous direction toward sustainability. Eco-rich metal-free graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4 ) is profiled as an attractive photocatalyst due to its fascinating properties, including excellent chemical and thermal stability, moderate band gap, visible light-active nature, and ease of fabrication. Nonetheless, the shortcomings of g-C 3 N 4 include fast charge recombination and limited surface-active sites, which adversely affect photocatalytic reactions. Among the modification strategies, point-to-face contact engineering of 2D g-C 3 N 4 with 0D nanomaterials represents an innovative and promising synergy owing to several intriguing attributes such as the high specific surface area, short effective charge-transfer pathways, and quantum confinement effects. This review introduces recent advances achieved in experimental and computational studies on the interfacial design of 0D nanostructures on 2D g-C 3 N 4 in the construction of point-to-face heterojunction interfaces. Notably, 0D materials such as metals, metal oxides, metal sulfides, metal selenides, metal phosphides, and nonmetals on g-C 3 N 4 with different charge-transfer mechanisms are systematically discussed along with controllable synthesis strategies. The applications of 0D/2D g-C 3 N 4 -based photocatalysts are focused on

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Electro/Photocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) is a long-term avenue toward synthesizing renewable fuels and value-added chemicals, as well as addressing the global energy crisis and environmental challenges. As a result,...

Faced by the concerning climate change worldwide and agriculture-dependent biochemical and energy-intensive thermochemical technologies, research and development efforts in exploring sustainable ethanol synthesis toward carbon neutrality are urgent. Recently, an electrochemical process via the electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) to synthesize ethanol has emerged as a promising alternative approach by directly consuming CO2 from the atmosphere. Despite the fact that numerous remarkable electrocatalysts with fascinating activity, selectivity, and stability have been extensively uncovered in this field, environmental impacts of this technology have rarely been acknowledged. Herein, a life cycle assessment (LCA) study is conducted to evaluate the potential environmental impacts and benefits of an innovative electrochemical process versus conventional biochemical and thermochemical processes toward the sustainable synthesis of 1 kg of ethanol. Impact assessment results revealed that with the contemporary electricity mix, the electrochemical process is still surpassed by the biochemical process, and its environmental benignity is not pronounced, attributed to tremendous electricity utilities accounting for 67.7–100% of impacts. However, it prevails over the two conventional routes when powered by renewable energies, particularly solar energy, with impact reduction ranging from 108.6 to 750.5%, while providing the greatest benefits with respect to terrestrial ecotoxicity (TETP). Carbon footprint further indicates that the electrochemical process becomes competitive and reaches carbon neutrality once driven by electricity with carbon intensity (CI) below 0.25 and 0.12 kg CO2 eq/kWh. Overall, in spite of its massive electricity utilities, the electrochemical ethanol synthesis route is highly promising in environmental impact remediation when coupled with renewable energies, which calls for more efforts from researchers and governments to achieve carbon neutrality and sustainability in years to come.

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