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Turning sewage sludge into valuable catalysts through atomic-level circularity

The transformation of municipal sludge into high-entropy single-atom catalysts offers not just a new materials synthesis route, but a new framework for how we conceive of waste, resource recovery and circularity.

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Fig. 1: From municipal sludge to atomic-level functionality.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52192684), the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (BX20250324).

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Correspondence to Han-Qing Yu.

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Gu, CH., Yu, HQ. Turning sewage sludge into valuable catalysts through atomic-level circularity. Nat Rev Mater 10, 725–726 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-025-00834-x

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