Advanced solar-driven interfacial evaporation technology for resource and energy recovery

The global crises of resource scarcity, energy shortages, and environmental degradation demand innovative solutions for sustainable development. Solar-driven interfacial evaporation (SIE) has emerged as a transformative technology for recovering resource/energy from seawater or wastewater. Despite SIE's high evaporation efficiency at the gas–liquid interface, significant challenges persist, including volatile organic compound (VOC) enrichment, selective separation limitations, and energy trade-offs in multifunctional systems. Accordingly, this work provides a comprehensive overview of recent SIE systems for resource/energy recovery while establishing novel dynamics and thermodynamics frameworks to guide their design and application. By shifting the paradigm from “water purification” to a “resource/energy factory”, SIE systems can offer a promising pathway toward carbon neutrality.