Cellulose-based films prepared directly from waste newspapers via an ionic liquid

• Waste newspapers after simple pretreatment could be quickly dissolved in AmimCl.
• The cellulose of waste newspapers degraded lightly in the dissolving process.
• The regenerated films retain almost all of the ingredients in waste newspapers.
• The regenerated cellulose-based films exhibited good mechanical property.

Waste newspapers, composed of cellulose (>60 wt%), lignin (∼15 wt%), hemicellulose (∼10 wt%) and other additives, are one kind of low-cost, easily collected and abundant resources. In order to get value-added products from this waste, in this work an attempt was made to directly convert waste newspapers into cellulose-based films by employing an ionic liquid 1-allyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (AmimCl) as a solvent. Most of the organic substances in this waste were dissolved quickly in AmimCl under mild conditions, and then coagulated and dried. Although containing lignin, hemicellulose and inorganic additives, the regenerated cellulose-based films were smooth, compact and semi-transparent, and exhibited good mechanical properties. If the newspaper/AmimCl solution was filtered to remove undissolved inorganic substances, the regenerated films became transparent and had a tensile strength of 80 MPa. Thus, this work provides a new, simple and highly efficient way to achieve a high-valued utilization of waste newspapers for packaging and wrapping.