Utilisation of bamboo leaves as carbon/silica catalyst for conversion of polymer waste to chloroester

Today, bamboo leaves is one of the agriculture waste that keeps increasing as the utilisation of bamboo leaves is not popularly known in Malaysia. The agriculture waste can be utilised to synthesis catalyst in order to reduce the environmental pollution. The polymer waste which referred to poly (ethylene glycol) 400 was used in the cosmetics and the personal product care. In this study, poly (ethylene glycol) 400 was used as a substrate and bamboo leaves was used to synthesis the catalyst to increase the catalytic activity. Carbon/ silica was fabricated from the bamboo leaves by carbonisation process to act as a catalyst. The catalyst were used to convert a polymer which is poly (ethylene glycol) 400 reacted with benzoyl chloride to transform into a useful chemical; 2-chloroethyl benzoate. The characterisation was performed by using XRD, TGA and FTIR. Result from XRD showed that these catalyst were amorphous. FTIR result showed the functional group of S=O, C=C and COOH were decrease when carbonisation temperature higher. SO3H-C/Sio2-450 was the best catalyst during catalytic reaction between poly (ethylene glycol) 400 and benzoyl chloride by achieving 93% conversion of poly (ethylene glycol) 400 and 10% yield of 2-chloroethyl benzoate.