Green Carbon Dots: A New Avenue Towards Sustainable Development

The growing list of environmental concerns, such as pollution and global warming, has forced the world to consider sustainable development not as an option, but as an inevitable necessity. Each year, approximately 250–280 gross tonnes of biomass waste are produced globally, which is either dumped into the earth or the ocean and poses a threat to environmental health and human survival. Fortunately, researchers are now attempting to recycle this biomass waste into value-added nanomaterials for human welfare. Green carbon dots are the most recent generation of carbon nanomaterials utilizing biomass resources that include animal and human derivatives, plant parts such as fruits, fruit peels, vegetables, spices, beverages, and natural polymers used as targeted precursors for nanosized carbon dots. They have expanded substantial amount of attention over the period due to their unusual characteristics like good biocompatibility, high photostability, tuneable fluorescence and optical properties, excellent water solubility, low toxicity, and environment friendliness. In this chapter, we aim to explain the synthesis and physicochemical properties of green carbon dots along-with their possible applications in biomedical fields and their role in achieving sustainable development. Being a novel research area, there are still many challenges in the way to explore full potential of these green synthesized carbon dots like size distribution, reducing the by-products during the synthesis, and improving the quantum yield, among others.