A potential application for textile industrial waste to produce eco-friendly composite

Today, with the increasing awareness of environmental conservation, many scientists are directing their work on environmental improvements. In the textile industry, dyestuff load of wastewater increases and improvements are made to reduce this load. As a contribution to these improvements, a nanocomposite is designed with clay, carboxymethylcellulose, chitosan and its modifications, which are totally natural. In this study, a nanocomposite designed to adsorb dyestuffs from textile wastewaters using modified clay, modified cellulose and modified chitosan. With the anionic modification of chitosan, it can be converted into carboxymethyl chitosan and it can also have an affinity to cationic structures. With this structure, a colored composite will be obtained while contributing to recycling and environment by providing adsorption of dyestuff in more than one kind. Also, clay-based nanocomposite addition into a polymer enhances the mechanical properties while contributing to thermal properties. In addition, Poly(lactic acid) which is a biopolymer is used as matrix and a new structure is produced by adding the nanocomposites into the biomatrix with 1, 3, 5, 7% ratios and performance properties are examined. PEG is added to every sample except pure PLA sample. While acquiring color, it does not add an extra dyestuff load to the environment, but rather evaluates the existing and recycles it again. FTIR for characterization of the nanocomposite, UV-vis for dye adsorption, tensile strength test and impact test for strength, DSC and TGA are carried out for thermal characteristics of samples. Also, rheometer is used for rheologic character analysis. According to mechanic test results, even moduli are decreased elongations are increased and samples become more ductile with nanocomposite addition. Also, nanocomposite addition increased the impact strength in general. In addition, when nanocomposite load increased the effects on mechanical enhancements increases. For thermal results, nanocomposite addition shows very close values to only PEG added samples and less than PLA sample while they enlarge the phase changing intervals. For rheology analysis results, loss and storage moduli are decreased but the viscosity of samples are significantly decreased which contributes to ease of applicability.