What is Cellulose?

-Cellulose, (C₆H₁₀O₅)_n, is an organic compound.

-It is also known as complex carbohydrates.

-It’s a polysaccharide composed of many B linked D-glucose units.

 

Where to Find Cellulose?

-Cellulose makes up plant’s cell wall.

-Plants can conduct photosynthesis to produce glucose and use it as a food source or link many glucose monomers to form cellulose.

-Average percentage of cellulose in plants is 33%. It may differ in the type of plants. As an example, cotton is made up of 90% cellulose whereas wood is made up of 40-50% cellulose.

-It’s the most common and abundant organic compound on Earth.

 

Characteristics of Cellulose

-Cellulose is insoluble in water and also hard to break down.

-This is due to the arrangement of the glucose monomers that make up cellulose.

-Glucose monomers in cellulose produce linear polymer chains that can align side by side. Hydrogen bonds are formed between these chains, thus producing a rigid structure of layered sheets of cellulose. This inflexible chemical structure gives cellulose its strength and also makes it insoluble in water.

 

Uses of Cellulose

-Cellulose is indigestible by the digestion system of most animals including humans.

-For humans, cellulose acts as dietary fibre which aids in faeces excretion.

-Ruminants, termites, and a small number of other animals can digest cellulose with the help of symbiotic microorganisms that live in their digestive track. These symbiotic microorganisms secrete enzymes to break down cellulose into its glucose monomers.

-Besides that, cellulose can be used to make varieties of industrial products including the very common paper we use almost everyday.

 

Cellulose in Paper Making

-As cellulose is insoluble in water, it is easy to separate it from other constituent of a plant.

-As early as A.D.100, the Chinese have already discovered the use of cellulose to produce papers.

-Woodchips obtain from trees are grinded and washed, bleached. After that, the wood pulp is poured over a vibrating mesh that filters out the water and other unwanted constituent of a plant. When water is drained away, what remain are the fibres (cellulose) that are the primary ‘ingredients’ of a paper.

 

Why Make Papers with Cellulose?

-It is comparably cheap.

-Most abundant source of fibres, easy to obtain.

-Easy to process with its insoluble in water characteristics.

 

Elephant Dung and Cellulose

-As elephants eat mainly plants, their waste is largely cellulose.

-Like most animals, elephants can only digest cellulose to a certain extend and most of the cellulose are excreted.

 

Why Elephant Dung?

-Traditional wood-pulp papers are mainly made up of cellulose.

-Making papers with elephant’s high-cellulose poop is possible.

-An elephant eat around 200-250kg of food and excretes around 50kg of dung per day.

-Elephants are poor digesters. More than 50% of what they eat (bamboo, grass, tree, shrubs) are excreted as ‘fibre pulp’.

-An elephant provide enough dung to make 115 papers a day.

-All handmade papers are made from fibrous materials, which is boiled and beaten to make the fibre pulp. However, the elephants have already completed the pulping process. They provide the fibres needed for paper making.

-Elephant dung does not have very foul smell unless they are sick. Therefore, the papers made out of it do not smell even without the use of chemicals.

-Elephant dung is a waste product. Turning them to paper contributes to environment care.

 

Elephant Dung Paper Making Process

1.    Collect elephant dung.

 

2.    Wash dung.

 

3.    Boil for 5 hours to kill bacteria.

 

4.    Spin cut and colour the fibres.

 

5.    Make fibres into equal weight balls.

 

6.    Sift evenly into frames and remove water.

 

7.    Dry under the sun.

 

8.    Sanding the papers for a smoother surface.

 

9.    Cut the papers to size.