Abstract
Bacterial cellulose (BC) has been studied as an alternative material in several segments of the food, pharmaceutical, materials and textile industries. The importance of BC is linked to sustainability goals, since it is an easily degradable biomaterial of low toxicity to the environment and is a renewable raw material. For use in the textile area, bacterial cellulose has attracted great interest from researchers, but it presents some challenges notably to its hydrophilic structure. This integrative review article brings together studies and methods related to minimizing the hydrophilicity of bacterial cellulose, in order to expand its applicability in the textile industry in its dry state. The databases consulted were Scopus, ScienceDirect, ProQuest and Web of Science, the documents investigated were scientific articles and the time period investigated was between 2015 and 2021. The results showed that although there are methods to make the BC membrane more hydrophobic, future studies in this regard and on other properties must continue so that bacterial cellulose can be commercially introduced in the textile sector.
Highlights
The textile industry is associated with numerous environmental problems
The aim of this paper is to provide a bibliometric review of the academic literature focused on the hydrophilic property of Bacterial cellulose (BC) and the treatments available to make it hydrophobic
Several properties of bacterial cellulose, such as mechanical strength, high crystallinity and threedimensional structure, favor the use of this material in the textile industry, but its hydrophilicity poses a challenge for its application as a textile fiber
Summary
The textile industry is associated with numerous environmental problems. Large amounts of harmful waste are generated at all stages of clothing manufacturing, with negative environmental and social impacts, such as landfill consumption, low resource efficiency and air/soil pollution (Chan et al 2018; Correia and Silva 2019; Sandvik and Stubbs 2017). The amount of material that requires disposal presents a real challenge for the fashion industry. This quantity has increased notably in the past 50 years, with around 15 million tons of used textile waste currently being generated each year in the USA (Domskiene et al 2019)
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