ABSTRACT
Plants, including their flowers, fruits or grains, roots, and residues, provide raw materials for food, textile, building, and pharmaceutical industries, fulfilling the basic and luxury needs and sustaining the economy. Agricultural practices ensure timely harvest of crops and felling of trees to utilize their economic products. A number of plant parts and their post-harvest remains are currently underutilized but have significant use in medicine, bioenergy, textiles, pulp and paper, colorants for food, furniture, walls, and fibers. Agro-based resources are biodegradable, in contrast to synthetic fiber manufacturing, which produces and disseminates toxic substances, polluting the soil, water and environment. Sustainability issues have been a focus on many platforms, including ASEAN vision 2025 and the UN 2030 Agenda, for ecological and economic prosperity through promotion of sustainable practices. It is time to initiate all-out efforts to utilize fibers from agricultural crop residues that are nonpolluting and user friendly compared to synthetic fibers. Agro-residue fibers’ uses in agro-products, biocomposites, biosorption, and biogenic fields are presented. The chapter emphasizes the potential of plant residues such as coir, corn, lotus, milkweed, oleaginous flax, pina, rice, sugar palm, tellicherry bark, and typha for high-value technical textiles. The fibers’ prominence as a potential substitute for existing synthetic fibers is emphasized. The advantages of widespread promotion of agro-residue utilization for fibers and its impact on farmers is also addressed. A case study on bird-nest fiber use in agrotech design for environmental efficiency is covered. The chapter highlights agro-residues as ideal agro-resources that should not be treated as waste.
