The quest for eco-friendly materials with anticipated positive impact for sustainability is crucial to achieve the UN sustainable development goals. Classical strategies of composite materials can be applied on novel nanomaterials and green materials. Besides the actual technology and applications also processing and manufacturing methods should be further advanced to make entire technology concepts sustainable. Here, they show an efficient way to combine two low-cost materials, cellulose and zinc oxide (ZnO), to achieve novel functional and "green" materials via paper-making processes. While cellulose is the most abundant and cost-effective organic material extractable from nature. ZnO is cheap and known of its photocatalytic, antibacterial, and UV absorption properties. ZnO nanowires are grown directly onto cellulose fibers in water solutions and then dewatered in a process mimicking existing steps of large-scale papermaking technology. The ZnO NW paper exhibits excellent photo-conducting properties under simulated sunlight with good ON/OFF switching and long-term stability (90 minutes). It also acts as an efficient photocatalyst for hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) generation (5.7 x 10(-9) m s(-1)) with an envision the possibility of using it in buildings to enable large surfaces to spontaneously produce H2O2 at its outer surface. Such technology promise for fast degradation of microorganisms to suppress the spreading of diseases.

The electrified production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) by oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is attractive to increase the sustainability of chemical industry. Here the same chains of intrinsically conductive polymer, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) are utilized, as ORR electrocatalyst, while varying polymeric primary dopants (PSS and Nafion) and the level of secondary doping with DMSO. These changes modulate various properties of the film, such as its microscale organization and electronic conductivity. The aim here is to clearly decouple the rate of the heterogeneous electron transfer (HET) of ORR from the diffusion affected by electronic conductivity and the electrochemically available surface area. It is found that the rate of HET and the double layer capacitance are significantly affected by primary dopant. On the contrary, secondary doping shows very little effect on the rate of HET. However, such secondary doping resulted in the increase of both electrochemically available surface area and the diffusion through the polymer film. This effect is attributed to a few orders increase of the electronic conductivity in the film improving availability of the polymer for electron transfer. The enhancement of diffusion upon the secondary doping of conducting polymer is utilized to improve direct conversion of air into H2O2 on gas diffusion electrode.