Plant fibers from wood, grasses, bast fibers and agricultural straws, stalks are renewable resource which has a humongous yield in China annually. The composition of the lignocellulosic material differs depending on the biomass source, but it usually consists of 20–50% cellulose, 20–30% hemicellulose, 7–30% lignin and 5–35% pectin, with lower amounts of structural proteins that all depend on the plant species. The traditional treatment of biomass, especially for agriculture residues is crude. It will cause severe environmental pollution and it is also a wastage of resources. The efficient utilization of these resources is limited because of the plant cell wall recalcitrance. Solving this problem through sustainable processing, meanwhile producing value-added products, is crucial. Nanocellulose, including cellulose nanofibers, cellulose nanocrystals, and cellulose nanosheet, is a high-value product from the cellulose stream. However, most research work on cellulose nanomaterials eliminates lignin from the production process utilizing only fully-bleached (lignin-free) pulp fibers. While lignocelluloses are renewable materials, cellulose nanomaterials (CNMs) can be considered sustainable only if both the process of production and application is also sustainable. In this work, we propose our results for sustainable production and application of plant-biomass-based nanomaterials. 

Sustainable production and application of plant-based-biomass nanomaterials