Abstract
Wood is an important raw material, especially for construction and industrial scale activities which have resulted in a large amount of wood waste (WW). The accumulation of industrial WW has led to serious environmental issues; hence, the utilization of the industrial WW is being studied by researchers due to the rich content of cellulose. This study investigated the physicochemical properties of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) derived from industrial WW. The preparation of the CNFs involves the pretreatment of WW with an alkaline deep eutectic solvent (DES) and bleaching with peracetic acid, followed by 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxyl (TEMPO)-mediated oxidation and mechanical post-treatment. Interestingly, the yield of the CNFs produced was 52%, which is half of the raw material used. Furthermore, the morphology of the WW-derived CNFs was analyzed from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The WW-derived CNFs showed a uniform size with a width of around 20–100 nm and a length of several micrometers. Moreover, the production of WW-derived CNFs was further verified by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) for the surface functional groups, X-ray diffraction (XRD) for the crystallography, and thermal gravimetry analysis (TGA) for thermal stability. The results obtained from these characterization methods have proved the successful transformation of the industrial WW into a high-potential nanomaterial, which is the CNFs that can be used for further applications in paper making, composites, packaging, textiles, biomedicine, energy storage, and electronics.