Heterogenous photocatalysis is widely used for waste-water treatment and degradation of pollutants and promises to advance the science of alternative materials with visible photo-excitations abilities. However, there are still fundamental material properties and processes that need to be understood in order to increase user-tailored catalytic systems' performance and efficiency while ensuring their optimized reactivities and large-scale development and implementation. Herein we developed graphene-based hybrid composites to be used as efficient nanocatalysts with increased ability to absorb visible light, that retain high corrosion-resistance properties when used in solution, and provide energy levels that match their reduction and oxidation half-reactions. Using both photo-deposition and photo-reduction methods, we first created platinum/tungsten trioxide conjugates with physico-chemical characteristics investigated by microscopical and spectroscopical analyses, and further decorated such conjugates onto graphene surfaces to create the hybrids. Our results demonstrate that the synthesized hybrids can degrade a model azo dye and further, show that graphene plays an important role in delaying electron transfer at its interface, with such effect being exploited for possible integration in the next generation of clean energy systems. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.