A Simple Route to Produce Highly Efficient Porous Carbons Recycled from Tea Waste for High-Performance Symmetric Supercapacitor Electrodes

High-performance porous carbons derived from tea waste were prepared by hydrothermal treatment, combined together with KOH activation. The heat-treatment-processed materials possess an abundant hierarchical structure, with a large specific surface of 2235 m² g⁻¹ and wetting-complemental hydrophilicity for electrolytes. In a two-electrode system, the porous carbon electrodes’ built-in supercapacitor exhibited a high specific capacitance of 256 F g⁻¹ at 0.05 A g⁻¹, an excellent capacitance retention of 95.4% after 10,000 cycles, and a low leakage current of 0.014 mA. In our work, the collective results present that the precursor crafted from the tea waste can be a promising strategy to prepare valuable electrodes for high-performance supercapacitors, which offers a practical strategy to recycle biowastes into manufactured materials in energy storage applications.