ABSTRACT The growing environmental concerns and the urgent need for recycling PET waste have driven the development of value‐added products from these materials. This study reports the production of high surface area activated carbon (AC) from domestic PET bottle waste through carbonization and KOH activation. A box‐Behnken response surface design was applied to optimize the selected as independent variables such as carbonization temperature (500–600 °C), KOH impregnation rate (1–4 g/g) and activation temperature (600–800 °C). The optimum conditions (501 °C, 3.774 g/g, and 794 °C) yielded a maximum BET surface area of 894.769 m 2 /g with a pore volume of 0.485 cm 3 /g. Characterization by FTIR, TGA, XRD, and SEM confirmed the formation of amorphous, microporous, and highly porous carbon structures comparable to commercial AC. The study shows that environmentally friendly and high surface area adsorbent materials can be produced by recycling waste PET bottles. This can make a significant contribution to the sustainable use of plastic waste.
Özçelik et al. (2026) studied this question.