Sustainable and Eco‐safe Nanocellulose‐based Materials for Water Nano‐treatment

In this chapter, the authors tell the story of a recently developed nanocellulose-based material, a nanosponge that has been successfully applied for fresh and marine water remediation, and whose eco-design has a lot of to do with the key concepts of circular economy and sustainability herein introduced. They describe the structural behavior of cellulose nanosponges. Moreover, in spite the issue of being nano-sized building blocks, both cellulose nanocrystals and cellulose nanofibers have resulted to be eco-safe, showing low toxicity toward developing zebrafishes, chosen as model organisms. These findings enforce the use of nanocellulose especially for water and wastewater treatment processes, in line with a choice of sustainability in the design of new nanostructured materials. The authors start looking the sponges' morphology by naked eye, and gradually zooming by means of different analytical approaches up to reach the nanoscale dimension.