Bleaching Pre-Treatment of Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch for Nanocellulose Extraction

Oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) is one of the waste by-products when palm oil is produced. Although a waste product, it can be turned into a valuable product by extracting nanocellulose through acid hydrolysis. The process requires a few steps; the most important is the pre-treatment process. In this research, bleaching pretreatment was used to characterize empty oil palm fruit bunches as raw materials for hydrolysis reactions to extract nanocellulose. The bleaching process was done using H 2 O 2 and the resulting samples were characterized using FT-IR and SEM. FT-IR analysis revealed that lignin-associated carbonyl groups were removed and there was a decrease in hemicellulose-related acetyl group peaks which confirmed effective pre-treatment. According to Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), surface morphology has also changed where the bleached fibres exhibited a rougher surface than the ones that were not bleached. Bleaching is proven to be successful at removing surface impurities, hemicellulose, and lignin and isolating the cellulose for the acid hydrolysis process.