1.

Introduction
Today’s world is faced with serious dangers of air, land and water
pollutions. Water pollution in particular, has raised serious concerns. In addition to
the shortage of resources of water, production of large volumes of wastewater has
put a lot of pressure on the humankind. The conventional technologies like
coagulation flocculation, oxidation, membrane separation, ion exchange, electro
precipitation, evaporation and floatation are inadequate to deal with the wastewater
treatment problem. Adsorption is known to be one of the best of the technologies
for the decontamination of water. Even though activated carbon based technology
is still used for treating wastewater, it is not cost and energy efficient. Hence
adsorption using low cost adsorbents has become an attractive choice.
Biopolymers such as chitosan and cellulose present an interesting option (Kalia &
Avérous, 2011). A number of studies have been made for the adsorptive removal of
heavy metals and dyes utilizing cellulose and chitosan based materials (Ahmad,
Ahmed, Swami & Ikram, 2015; Güçlü, Gürdağ & Özgümüş, 2003; No & Meyers,
2000; O’Connell, Birkinshaw & O’Dwyer, 2008; Zhou, Zhang, Zhou & Guo,
2004).
Cellulose and chitosan constitute the first and second most abundant
biopolymers on earth. They are natural, renewable, environmentally benign, cost
efficient, non toxic, biodegradable and biocompatible (Crini & Badot, 2008).
Cellulose is majorly derived from plant sources such as grasses, reeds, stalks and
woody parts of the vegetation. Animals, algae, fungi, amoebae, cellular slime
molds, green algae and bacteria also contribute in the production of celluloses
(Azizi Samir, Alloin & Dufresne, 2005). Cellulose consists of over ten thousand
repeating units of β (l→4)–D–glucose linkages and has the formula (C 6H10O5)n
while chitosan which is normally derived from de–acetylation of chitin is made up
of β–(l→4) linkages of N–acetyl–D glucosamine and D–glucosamine. Chitosan is
found mainly in crustacean shells such as shrimp, crab, lobster, crawfish, and cell
walls of fungi as well as cuticles of insects (Jayakumar, Tamura, Prabaharan,
Kumar, Nair & Furuike, 2011).
 With the advancement in nanosciences, development of cellulose and
chitosan based materials having nano sizes has become possible. Cellulose and
chitosan nanoparticles/nanocomposites become materials of choice because of
attractive surface area, chemical accessibility, ease of functionalization and
absence of internal diffusion (Chang, Chang & Chen, 2006; Hokkanen, Repo,
Suopajärvi, Liimatainen, Niinimaa & Sillanpää, 2014; Suman, Kardam, Gera &
Jain, 2015). A fairly good amount of literature is available for the adsorption of
heavy metals and dyes by employing these potential adsorbents.

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