Cellulose from Agricultural and Industrial Waste: Extraction and Characterization

Agricultural and industrial wastes are generated in huge quantities all over the world; generally they are not reused or recycled, therefore they are among the most environmental pollutants. Nowadays, the attention towards using these agricultural and industrial wastes, as attractive sources and among the most potential available stocks that are used for production of many useful molecules has been increased. Therefore the aim of the present work was to extract cellulose from different agricultural biomass and industrial waste, due to their contents of carbohydrates, as sources for such useful molecule, in particular cellulose via fast and simple technique. Simply, eco-friendly processes were carried out for isolation of cellulose from different waste sources. The used process is very efficient for obtaining good yield of cellulose where the extracted cellulose amount was (17.4%, 20%, and 18.2%) from rice husk, waste office paper and sugar cane respectively.. The powder X-ray diffraction and FT-IR were used to characterize the extracted cellulose. In terms of crystallinity and structure behaviours, a comparison with standard cellulose was made and the results suggested that the isolated cellulose was in agreement well with the standard one and thus can be tried to produce biofuel .among other applications.