ORIGINAL RESEARCH Development and characterization of eco-sustainable banana fiber nonwoven material: surface treatment, water absorbency and mechanical properties K. Z. M. Abdul Motaleb . Rashed Al Mizan . Rimvydas Milas ˇius Received: 29 March 2020 / Accepted: 7 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract In this study, four types of ecofriendly non-woven materials were developed from different parts of bark and leaf of banana plant i.e. outer bark, middle bark, inner bark (IB) and mid rib (MR) by wet laid web formation. Fibers were extracted chemically by treating with NaOH from all the parts. Due to the very high absorbency of banana fiber, the prepared non-wovens were treated with water repellent (WR) chemical for improving their hydrophobicity. The effects of WR on the physical, mechanical and morphological properties of the non-wovens were also investigated. The hydrophobicities of all the nonwovens were improved remarkably with the concentration of WR. It took 1.25, 2.69, 4.20 and 4.67 h to absorb a drop of water for OB nonwovens at a concentration of 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% WR respectively where, all the untreated nonwovens took almost zero seconds. Just like OB, all other nonwo- vens followed exactly the same trend. OB nonwoven exhibited the highest tensile strength (TS), Elonga- tion-at-break (EB) and young‘s modulus (YM) of 8.56 Mpa, 12.56% and 215 Mpa respectively where, IB showed the lowest TS and YM of 1.23 and 67 Mpa respectively and MR showed the lowest EB of 1.77%. Although there were no remarkable effects of WR on tensile properties nevertheless, TS and YM were increased but EB was decreased to a small extent with the concentration of WR. The chemical bonding, morphology of the fiber and nonwovens were also investigated by FTIR and SEM analysis. Keywords Banana fiber Á Wet-laid nonwoven Á Surface treatment Á Water absorbency Á Mechanical properties Introduction There is an emerging possibility of eco-sustainable materials especially based on natural fibers, which have been studied thoroughly over the years by numerous scientists. Therefore, understanding the harmful nature of synthetic fibers, researchers are always aware for turning away from them and focusing on the substitute, natural fiber based mate- rials (John and Thomas 2008; Devi et al. 1997; Rao et al. 2010). The products from these fibers have significantly influenced the market with various types of products including nonwovens, composites and packaging materials (Khalfallah et al. 2014; Thwe and Liao 2003; Mohammed et al. 2015; Ilyas et al. 2018; K. Z. M. A. Motaleb (&) Á R. Milas ˇius Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Design, Kaunas University of Technology, Studentu ˛ 56, 51424 Kaunas, Lithuania e-mail: k.motaleb1@ktu.edu R. A. Mizan Department of Textile Engineering, BGMEA University of Fashion and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh 123 Cellulose https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-020-03343-y