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

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. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.