Investigation into the characteristics of bagasse processed with 3C-DES and the production of chemimechanical pulp for pulp molded

Pulp molded generated from renewable bagasse as biodegradable packaging materials has been widely viewed as an eco-friendly and cheap way to substitute the current huge consumption of nondegradable plastics, and deep eutectic solvents (DES) pretreatment are a promising approach to obtain high-yield pulp efficiently and sustainably. However, mainstream binary-component DES still suffers issues of high viscosity and corrosiveness. This study put forward a ternary-component DES (3C-DES) with the addition of ethylene glycol (EG) into choline chloride (ChCl) and P-toluenesulfonic acid (PTSA) and examined pretreatment performance and optimal DES ratio for thread rolling bagasse via compositional analysis and physicochemical characterization. Moreover, density functional theory calculations were used to reveal structures and weak interactions of different ratios of 3C-DES, and a novel 3C-DES pretreatment chemical-mechanical pulp and pulp molded were finally prepared. The results indicate that the 3C-DES with ChCl:PTSA:EG molar ratio of 1:1:3 is most effective, evidenced by more than 97.94% lignin removals. The 3C-DES pretreated mechanical pulp exhibits superior fiber properties, whereas the hot-pressed pulp molded shows excellent physical properties and thermal stability. Thus, the proposed 3C-DES has great potential to obtain high-yield high-performance pulp molded with low cost and environmental sustainability.