## 1 Introduction  
Over the past years, in countries that produce rice, like India, China, Bangladesh, Brazil, USA, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the rest of Southeast Asia, a massive amount of agricultural waste was obtained and sometimes had been discarded as waste product [1]. The production of rice in paddies all over the world is approximated to be 600 million tons a year, where 20% of the crop yield is the husk-to-paddy ratio, and 18% is the ash-to-husk ration, making the overall ash production 21 million tons per year [2]. However, nowadays, people found a path to use the rice husk (RH) in a more beneficial way, instead of it being a waste product. Several research studies have focused on the properties of rice husk, finding that, among all the countries around the world that produce rice, their factories had started to use the rice husk (RH) as an energy source, especially in milling operations and also for household lighting in the countryside areas [3]. This is because rice husk ash has several properties that, depending on the combustion method, makes it beneficial in many ways. Burning of the RH at higher temperatures produces white rice husk ash (WRHA). In previous studies, it has been found that combusted WRHA contains 95.60% SiO\({}_{2}\)[4]. This finding of a huge amount of silica in the combusted WRHA makes it a precious material, since it can be used as the silica precursor to produce silicate glasses and many other products, such as ceramic tiles. In fact, it had been proven by [PERSON] and co-researchers that by using the wasted WRHA as the silica source, an exact same product of industrial glass that has the same glassy characteristic can be produced [2]. Apart from that, silicate glass from WRHA had recently been researched as a potential luminescence material. In previous research, [PERSON] and co-researchers conducted research regarding the europium oxide-doped zinc silicate glasses derived from WRHA. From the result obtained, when doping zinc silicate glass with europium oxide, the photoluminescence revealed red emission at -722 nm and the emission occurred due to the 4f-4f transition of the europium ions [5]. Besides, another study regarding the luminescence properties of zinc silicate glass doped with cobalt oxide derived from WRHA also had been carried out by [PERSON] and co-researchers. In 2018, [PERSON] and co-researchers had found that zinc silicate glass and glass-ceramics from WRHA doped with cobalt oxide emitted a red emission under UV light. The peak was attributed to the d-d transition of the cobalt oxide ions [6]. However, a luminescence study of undoped zinc silicate glass and glass-ceramics derived from WRHA is rare to be found. Hence, for this high composition of silica in the WRHA and its potential as a luminescence material, a comprehensive study regarding the fabrication and characterization of zinc silicate (willemite) will be reported. Zinc silicate (Zn\({}_{2}\)SiO\({}_{4}\)) or willemite is well known among researchers as a supreme and most suitable host matrix for glass phosphor and other optoelectronic materials, since it has a quite huge band gap around 5.5 eV, high chemical compound stability, and a great glass transparency [7]. Besides, it also has another special feature--a large excitation binding energy--allowing it to be used as an enhancer for triggering the luminescence inside the neon discharged lamps, fluorescent lamps, black-and-white televisions, colour televisions, oscilloscopes, laser technology, optical communications, optical fibre amplifiers, waveguides, and light emitting diodes (LED) [8; 9; 10]. Nowadays, the production of low-cost zinc silicate glass and glass-ceramics is a topic of interest among researchers. In this present work, the fabrication of a novel zinc silicate glass and glass-ceramics fabricated from WRHA by using conventional melt and quenching methods is reported. The best part of this work is the utilization of WRHA as the silicon source instead of using pure silica, which is very expensive.