Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunches as Raw Material of Dissolving Pulp for Viscose Rayon Fiber in Making Textile Products

The creative fashion industry produces several textile products that play an important role in the national economy. In various countries, this industry has continued to grow along with the strong flow of information technology and e-commerce. The development of textile products for fashion is very dynamic and competitive. Competition is not only about price, but also the quality of organic/synthetic materials, the comfort provided, and designs that change every 4–6 months. Recently, creative fashion not only relies on natural and synthetic polymer-made fibers but also biomass-based waste materials. Therefore, this study aims to manufacture textile products from biomass-based waste materials that can be applied to the creative fashion industry. Two types of raw materials from oil palm empty fruit bunches (EFB), namely, whole-empty fruit bunches (WEFB) and stalk-empty fruit bunches (SEFB), are used as an excellent innovation of rayon viscose fiber (RVF), a noncotton organic yarn capable of providing a solution to the 99% import of global cotton needs. This is expected to increase competitiveness, as well as the added value of palm oil products and their derivatives. The process of manufacturing DP chemically includes prehydrolysis, cooking, bleaching to dissolve the lignin and noncellulosic materials as well as isolation to purify POEFB fiber. Furthermore, DP testing is carried out to determine product quality and compare it with the national product standards. The results show that the alpha-cellulose content reaches >94% with variations in the active alkali of 18%, 20% and 24%. This implies that the WEFB and SEFB are used to fulfill the first requirements of the national standard (SNI 938:2017). The WEFB with an active alkali variation of 24% meets the SNI standard for rayon pulp with a value of S10 = 3.07 and S18 = 7.14%, while all variations of SEFB show opposite results. The use of active alkali at 24% had a brighter color than between 18% and 20%. Additionally, the fiber density of WEFB appears to be higher than that of SEFB. These results correlate positively with DP prepared using 24% alkali as the optimum treatment for all products, as well as the morphological observations performed with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which shows that WEFB fixated fiber had a larger diameter than SEFB.