| Summary: | The direct or indirect discharge of organic pollutants causes serious environmental problems and endangers human health. The high electron–hole recombination rate greatly limits the catalytic efficiency of traditional TiO<sub>2</sub>-based catalysts. Therefore, starting from low-cost activated carbon (AC), a photocatalyst (F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC) comprising fluorine (F)- and silicon (Si)-doped TiO<sub>2</sub> loaded on AC has been developed. F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC has a porous structure. TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles were uniformly fixed on the surface or pores of AC, producing many catalytic sites. The band gap of F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC is only 2.7 eV. In addition, F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC exhibits an excellent adsorption capacity toward methyl orange (MO) (57%) in the dark after 60 min. Under the optimal preparation conditions, F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC showed a significant photodegradation performance toward MO, reaching 97.7% after irradiation with visible light for 70 min. Even under the action of different anions and cations, its degradation efficiency is the lowest, at 64.0%, which has good prospects for practical application. At the same time, F-Si-TiO<sub>2</sub>/AC has long-term, stable, practical application potential and can be easily recovered from the solution. Therefore, this work provides new insights for the fabrication of low-cost, porous, activated, carbon-based photocatalysts, which can be used as high-performance photocatalysts for the degradation of organic pollutants.
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