Ultralight, hydrophobic, sustainable, cost-effective and floating kapok/microfibrillated cellulose aerogels as speedy and recyclable oil superabsorbents

Abstract

Cellulose aerogels achieve excellent absorption of waste oil and organic pollutant, which has received lots of attention recently. It is still a big challenge to obtain aerogels with both high cost-effectiveness and advanced oil absorption performance, since it is a time-consuming, and environmentally unfriendly process to obtain cellulose, compared with direct usage of natural fibers. In this manuscript, we develop highly porous and hydrophobic kapok/microfibrillated cellulose (MFC) aerogels with a dual-scale hierarchically porous structure at micro-level as cost-effective, sustainable, and floating superabsorbents via simple vacuum freeze-drying and surface modification. Kapok, a natural hollow fiber, has been recently considered as a new sustainable resource for oil cleanup. By partially replacing MFC with chopped kapok fibers in MFC aerogels (MMAs), the resultant kapok/MFC aerogels (KCAs) exhibit ultralow density (5.1 mg/cm−3), ultrahigh porosity (99.58%) and hydrophobicity (140.1°) leading to advanced oil sorption (130.1 g/g) that is 25.3% higher than that of MMAs. In addition, these KCAs can rapidly and selectively absorb waste oil from oil-water mixture with ultrahigh absorption ability of 104–190.1 g/g, which is comparable to other environmentally unfriendly and high-cost aerogels. Furthermore, the KCAs own excellent reusability and sustainability. These benefits enable the KCAs a suitable alternative to clean oil spills.