Natural grass to all-biomass biodegradable tape and superior oil-water separation fabric

Abstract

Valorization of agricultural and forestry wastes is a promising and meaningful strategy to turn wastes into treasure. Here, we developed a simple and easy-to-scale method to fabricate all-biomass biodegradable tape and superior oil-water separation fabric from the natural grass. The natural Hybrid Pennisetum grass was transformed into the biodegradable and low-cost tapes by partially removing hemicellulose to destroy “biomass recalcitrance” and following a direct dissolution/regeneration process in ionic liquids, because the regenerated all-biomass films from grass exhibit high tensile strength of 58.6 ± 2.9 MPa, which achieves the standard of engineering plastics. In addition, the all-biomass ultrafine fibers with micron-scale diameters were prepared by the air-blowing spinning process. Due to the outstanding hydrophilicity and under-water super-hydrophobicity, the non-woven fabric consisting of 8–12 μm fibers had excellent oil-water separation performance with a super-high flux of exceed 25,000 L•m −2•h −1 (only with gravity) and an extremely high separation efficiency of 100%, which are much better than the previous reports. Furthermore, the all-biomass oil-water separation fabric can be easily prepared and is completely feasible in the high salty solution and acid/alkaline solution. Therefore, a simple and practical process is demonstrated to construct high-performance matetials from low-cost biomass wastes, providing a huge potential in circular economy, environmental protection and bioresource utilization.