Expert Insights by Martin Fairbank

Did you know that blastomycosis can also infect humans working near wood chips, sawdust or bark piles?

Removing ink from recycled printed papers, known as deinking, has a very short history.

In the beginning, pulp was beaten with sticks. This method is only used today for certain exotic non-wood fibres, or for historical interest.

Dyes are used in papermaking to provide the right tint of paper or to produce coloured grades, as measured by the L*a*b* value.

According to the Global Carbon Budget project, there were 40 billion tonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions worldwide in 2023.

In a blog article last year, I wrote about the potential of high-temperature heat pumps (HT-HPs) to save energy in papermaking.

In mid-January, VTT, the research institution based in Helsinki, announced an “Emission-Free Pulping” research program, a five-year €15 million research project to “significantly reduce biomass burning and increase the product yield of wood material used for pulping from approximately 50% to around 70%.”

Eucalyptus is a genus encompassing about 700 species of shrubs and trees. Depending on the species and your point of view, eucalypti are either invasive species that threaten our water supply or incredibly productive species that are being used to disrupt traditional pulp markets.

The recent announcement of the permanent closure of the pulp and paper mill in Powell River, BC, which had been idled since 2021, evoked some nostalgic thoughts about the many mill closures in the Canadian industry over the last half century.

If you’ve walked through a lot of paper mills you’ve probably seen a lot of waste heat emitted. Most paper mills try to recover some of this heat using heat exchangers.

In a previous blog article on textile fibres published in September 2022, I discussed the pros and cons of animal, vegetable and mineral (synthetic) fibres. But there’s more to the story!

Looking back over the last several years, the Canadian northern bleached softwood kraft (NBSK) pulp industry has been on a roller coaster ride.

Metsä is not only the Finnish word for forest, but also the name of a Finnish cooperative owned by 90,000 Finnish forest owners that collectively own over half of Finland’s private forests.

Cake batter can be easily mixed with a wooden spoon, but bread dough, with its higher solids content, requires a lot more energy to be properly mixed. Similarly, wood pulp becomes more difficult to mix with bleach liquor as the solids content increases, requiring higher mixing energy.

Since humans first clothed themselves, clothing has changed a lot, especially in the last 100 years. Today, considering the number of humans on the planet, it is more important than ever to consider the sustainability aspects of the fibres and processes used to make that clothing.

Sometimes the barriers put up by intellectual property lawyers to protect their invention lead to innovation that results in the development of a better product by its competitors. This was the case with the carboxylated nanocellulose product now being produced by Anomera in Temiscaming, Quebec.

For the second year in a row, PAPTAC’s annual Paperweek/BIOFOR conference was held virtually. Last year’s virtual format hosted on Microsoft Teams resulted in very high attendance by mill personnel and this year was no different – out of 969 registrants, 741 were from paper companies.

A few years ago I was at a roadside viewpoint in Utah looking at a slope covered with poplar trees  whose leaves were starting to turn yellow in the cold October air. An interpretive panel pointed out that while different shades of yellow could be seen in different groups of trees, all of the trees in each grouping were exactly the same shade of yellow.

The 2021 Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to Benjamin List and David MacMillan, who independently discovered organocatalysts about 20 years ago.

Some children are reluctant students of mathematics; they’re not interested in learning equations they don’t think they’ll ever have a use for. I find there’s something magical, however, in plugging numbers into an equation and coming up with an answer – like solving a puzzle!

In his book published in early 2021, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”, Bill Gates points out that the world is currently adding 51 billion tons per year of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting the increase in global temperature by only 1.5 °C.