II.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Mung bean plantation is one of the principal agricultural industries in the
Philippines. It is ranked 7th in production of vegetables on the year 2017 which
amounted to 35,341 MT (Philippines Statistics Authority). Although there is a great
amount of nutritional value in mung bean that can be consumed, there is also a
significant amount of agricultural waste generated by the produce. There are
large quantities of cellulosic and non – cellulosic raw materials are generated
during the harvesting of mung bean. One of these is mung bean pods which
acounts for the 40% of the mung bean plant and 70% of the legume. This means
that on the year 2017, we generated 82.46 thousand metric tons of waste mung
bean pods. According to a local resident of Isabela, mung bean pods are just
being accumulated because the waste pods are being dumped in a landfill
after harvesting.

Another issue is that there is a high demand of CMC which amounted to

2.7 million kilograms but there are no local manufacturers of CMC. The local
suppliers of CMC which are CMC Builders, Innovative Fibre Industries Inc. and
Uni-Dravo Commercial Corp do not manufacture CMC but they import CMC
from other countries and distribute it to industries that needs the product. This
means that the pharmaceutical, paper, textile, soaps and detergents, and
other industries who uses CMC as a raw material gets their supply from other
countries namely, China, India, Japan, etc.

In line with this issues, the researchers proposed the study ”Mercerization
and Etherification of Mung Bean Pods for the Production of Carboxymethyl
Cellulose (CMC)” that will help utilize mung bean pods and convert it to a useful
compound – Carboxymethyl Cellulose