Sustainable coatings fabricated from inorganic wastes for indoor humidity control and degradation of formaldehyde

With the development of living standard, people spend more time indoors, and the diversified home decoration will lead to indoor hazardous gas emission. Among them, formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the most important sources of indoor air pollution, which is commonly found in building materials as a human carcinogen. To address this issue, we developed highly efficient multifunctional green building coatings (GBC) by TiO₂, enhancement silica fume (ESF) and spent fluid catalytic cracking catalysts (sFCCC). Among these prepared GBC, the GBC-0.8 exhibited HCHO removal efficiency of 85.0 % under visible light at ambient temperature, which was much higher than that of commercial coatings (30.8%). In addition, moisture adsorption-desorption carrier tests were executed by different humidity. The humidity control capacity of GBC-0.8 could reach 293.8 g/m² and demonstrate superior stability after 3 cycles. Compared with pristine TiO₂, the addition of ESF and sFCCC showed higher specific surface area and pore size distribution, which was beneficial to improve humidity control and photocatalytic degradation performance. This study provides a promising green method for designing multifunctional green building materials coatings to recycle waste into high-value products and remove HCHO at room temperature