Nata de coco as an abundant bacterial cellulose resource to prepare aerogels for the removal of organic dyes in water

Abstract

A hydrogel-like product of the bacterial fermentation of coconut water is well-known as nata de coco which contains low-cost and high-quality bacterial cellulose. In this work, nata de coco was applied for the facile preparation of lightweight bacterial cellulose aerogels upon grinding and subsequent freeze-drying. The obtained aerogels possessed the three-dimensional network containing bacterial cellulose fibers with high crystallinity and porosity. The experimental results proved the high affinity of the bacterial cellulose network to the cationic dyes with adsorption capacities from 25 to 81 mg/g. By contrast, the aerogel was inefficient with most of the tested anionic dyes except for congo red which afforded a significant adsorption capacity of 145 mg/g. The promising results were obtained without any further chemical modification being applied to the bacterial cellulose aerogels and notably comparable to the previous performances of biomass-based sorbents. This biomaterial showed a great potential in environmentally-friendly treating organic dyes-polluted wastewater.