12 th Arab International Conference on Polymer Science and Technology 26-29 October, Luxor, Egypt P-19: Management of Citrus Waste by Switching in the Production of Nanocellulose Sania Naz 1,2 , Naveed Ahmed 3 *, Ihsan ul Haq 3 , Nasir. M. Ahmad 4 , Muhammad Zia 1 1 Department of Biotechnology, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan 2 Preston Institute of Nanoscience and Technology, Preston University Islamabad, Pakistan 3 Department of Pharmacy, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan 4 School of Chemical and Material Engineering (SCME), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan *Correspondence to: naveedtanoli2003@gmail.com Abstract Citrus production throughout the world has been increasing day by day. Orange is the main producer with about 82% of total production (Marin et al., 2007). Worldwide increase in production was 14% in 2010, calculated to be 66.4 million metric tons in comparison with data from 1997-1999 (Mamma et al., 2008). Citrus fruit processing industries produces vast quantity of waste materials which are difficult to handle in a proper way. Waste produced by the processing units include large amount of peel, pulp, seeds, etc. If the waste material is not utilized in any process, it can result in soil pollution and bad odors as they exhibit waste disposable problems (Dhillon et al., 2004). Dried citrus peel is a rich source of cellulose, hemicelluloses, proteins and pectin while fewer amounts of fats are also present, however, cellulose makes up about 40% that is comparable to other sources of cellulose (Islam et al., 2012). Waste generated from citrus could be useable for the extraction of cellulose and nanocellulose. By our proposed methodology, it is possible to extract about 10 % of cellulose from citrus waste. In order to isolate aggregated cellulose and convert it into crystalline structure acid hydrolysis of amphorous cellulose was done which resulted in reduction in size of cellulose and resulting in highly crystalline structure. The obtained cellulose was characterized by SEM (Scanning electron microscopy) and XRD (X-rays diffraction) technique. This extracted cellulose contains higher proportion of amorphous cellulose