Rice straw is one of the agricultural crop residues, and it can be utilized for its rich cellulose content. This work extracted cellulose from the locally collected rice straw and prepared the cellulose acetate from the rice straw-derived cellulose. The cellulose was isolated by an extraction process using an alkaline deep eutectic solvent, followed by bleaching to remove lignin and hemicellulose, and lastly the purification of cellulose for efficient acetylation process. The prepared cellulose acetate was characterized using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) to confirm the successful acetylation of cellulose. The properties of the prepared cellulose acetate were compared with the commercial cellulose acetate. The FTIR result confirmed the replacement of hydroxyl groups on cellulose structure by the acetyl groups while the XRD analysis has resulted in the crystallinity index of 25.7% for the prepared cellulose acetate. As one of the cellulose derivatives, the cellulose acetate prepared from the rice straw-derived cellulose showed better thermal properties as the melting temperature was found to be more than 300 °C.
