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Abstract
Society as a whole produces an excessive amount of waste and thinks its ok to do so. Government regulations encourage this due to high standards and lots of regulation, so there is a lot of biomass that is unused wasting away. This is especially true for the paper and cotton industries. This research aims to take the biomass and create hydrogels by producing nano-sized particles created from the biomass. These hydrogels are versatile and do not create excessive amounts of additional waste. They are pretreated using sustainable materials, carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), and use homogenization to produce nanofibrillated hydrogels. The biomasses used in this research were from kraft pulp, cotton noil and silk sources. After being produced into hydrogels, their rheological, morphological, and thermal properties were analyzed. This research also suggests several potential applications such as biomedical sutures, textile dyeing, and composites that these hydrogels can be applied to.