In the present research, firstly cellulose was extracted from Platanus orientalis tree leaves waste. Then, the hydrophobic cellulose-based composite sponge was synthesized with combination of extracted cellulose by different ratios of chitosan as a natural polymer. The structure and properties of synthesized materials were characterized using XRD, FT-IR, nitrogen adsorption-desorption, TGA-DTG, water contact angle (WCA), FE-SEM and EDX techniques. The synthesized sponge was utilized as an effective sorbent in order to remove the oil and other organic pollutants from aqueous solutions. The results of the structural analyses proved the fine properties of the synthesized materials, e.g. the results of WCA analysis of the synthesized sponge by 140° showed its hydrophobic properties. The sorption process was conducted with 10 organic pollutants including n-hexane, vegetable oil, motor oil, paraffin oil, petrol, diesel, chloroform, kerosene, crude oil and dichloromethane, and the sorption capacity was obtained very high as 5.13, 7.19, 7.69, 7.47, 6.48, 6.25, 10.36, 6.02, 5.24 and 15.47 g g-1 for optimum sponge in comparison with other similar sorbents. The kinetic study exhibited a well accordance between the experimental data and pseudo-second-order model for all tested pollutants using the optimum sorbent sponge indicating the chemical interactions among the pollutants and the sorbent available active sites. The optimum sorbent sponge maintained its sorption capacity across six consecutive reusability cycles by a negligible reduction with final sorption capacity of 3.37, 9.72 and 5.85 g g-1 for diesel, chloroform and crude oil, respectively in the sixth cycle.
