hello everyone and welcome to ACS webinars connecting you at the best and brightest minds in chemistry live every Thursday from Washington DC I'm Michael David and I will be your host for today's special broadcast which is part of chemists celebrate Earth Week and is being co-produced with the ACS green chemistry Institute today we will be joined by Richard van DD who is the professor in the department of forest biomaterials at North Carolina State University in Raleigh Richard is going to demonstrate the potential of paper and pulp recycling as a renewable biodegradable an environmentally compatible solution that could offer a better alternative to our current single-use items our moderator for today is David constable who is the science director of the American Chemical Society's green chemistry Institute David has held a variety of industry roles in energy environment safety and health focusing on influencing scientists engineers and decision makers responsible for chemical research development and manufacturing in the chemical pharmaceutical aerospace and defense industries and with that I would like to turn it over to David to give today's presentation started good afternoon Michael and thanks everybody for joining us today for this webinar it's part of ACS's chemists celebrate Earth Week and we really are excited to have Richard Venditti do this webinar he teaches as you heard chemical process control unit operations of poultry paper and environmental lifecycle assessment at NC su has a PhD in chemical engineering so he comes very well prepared and speaks very knowledgeably about this topic so without further ado I'll turn it over to Richard okay thank you David I'm just gonna start off by giving you the little outline of what we're gonna talk about today first we're gonna overview the paper industry and then after that I'm gonna show you three four examples of green chemistry in the paper industry after that we'll talk about paper recycling and I'll show you a great example of how we can recycle and most efficiently use some of our paper products and then finally some cutting-edge stuff innovation and green chemistry concepts in the paper industry and finally we'll summarize and we'll have a little discussion about paper versus plastic for single uses now on before I get started I want to explain one of the main objectives of this talk and that is to demonstrate that the paper industry uses in a very very strong way the basic principles of green chemistry and so you can see there the list of things that are incorporated in green chemistry things like safe chemicals prevention of waste appropriate starting materials and what I want to do is show you that the paper industry uses sustainable raw materials sustainable processes and produces green products that meet the requirements of these principles so first let's talk about an overview people tend to think that the role of paper and the amount of paper is decreasing but that's not the case paper is such an important part of society and all the human activities we usually think about communication but packaging is a very very probably the most important part of the paper industry right now and growing as we have the Amazon phenomenon and people ordering at their house getting small USB drives in two gallon boxes it's incredible how much more packaging we're going to demand in the future tissue and tiling is a big thing and then other things that you might not think of hygiene and health products filtration and then we have dissolving Popes these are used to make cellulose plastics and also other additives that you might not think of in this slide I see I show a screwdriver very interesting story hundreds of years ago screws bolts and screwdrivers were all made out of wood and we have evolved evolved and evolved and we've come back to a screwdriver with a handle that is width based so these cellulosic plastics are very important in society I also show a ice cream cone a lot of people love ice cream cellulose is found in ice cream actually cellulose gums are introduced into the ice cream to give that ice cream an airy feel to it and it increases the silkiness the creaminess of the ice cream so paper and pulp products are everywhere in our lives this just shows paper and board demand globally and what you'll see is we're about at 400 million metric tons of paper per year so what does that mean to get all that paper we use about a billion tons of wood and we'll talk a little bit more about wood later and then we also use 20 billion tonnes of water so we use the water and we actually return it to the environment after we've cleaned it and processed it but takes a lot of raw materials this slide tells you another story and basically on the y-axis here you've got consumption per person for different countries and what you can see is the United States is about 300 kilograms per person per year and what you'll also notice is that the amount of paper and board that is consumed is directly related to the gross domestic product or how much people make and what you'll see down at the lower ends here emerging countries like China and India are only actually consuming about 50 kilograms per year per person and what's going to happen is these countries as they emerge are going to grow in their use in consumption of paper what that means is a lot more demand for paper in the future it's not going away so our raw material paper has a great story we need forests and we use forest products we use wood to make paper now forests are incredibly important to society I'm not exaggerating when I say forests allow life on earth to exists with it forests help filter our water they actually help us produce food that we eat and they also clean the air and allow us to breathe forests are huge the sad story is since the Industrial Age Forest lands have decreased by 33 percent the good news is if we properly manage forests we can get a lot of the ecosystem services from them and we can actually provide 2/3 of the wood that we need for industrial purposes so if we're efficient with our forests it's really good what are some of the benefits of forests basically forests provide an unrivaled ecosystem services in other words they store carbon they purify water and air they produce oxygen they produce good healthy soils they're a climate buffer there's one estimate and that estimate says that the ecosystems if you have to pay for them approximately worth about four point seven trillion dollars per year that's what we get from our forests incredibly important for society we do manage forests very carefully especially in the United States but globally we have certification programs and their main goal is to protect the forests and the life that's around it water quality biodiversity wildlife habitat all these things are included in certification more than half of forest land certified in Canada Europe and the Scandinavian countries and that certification is third party so SFI and FSC third party organizations do that in the United States 97% of Timberland is certified meaning it's managed in the proper way and it's also documented how well it's managed in the United States 29% is from the third-party but in general people that use forest products are getting the product of the fiber and the wood from certified lands that are managed very sustainably the United States has a great story between 1990 and 2015 the amount of forested area has increased well why are we least losing forest land the fact is is that fire pests disease invasive species they're going to attack the forests and consume the wood in a wasteful way so if we're not using it in general we're wasting it so it would much if you much better to take wood and make products for society rather than have it destroyed by pests in tropical countries and in many places in the world we're losing forest areas mainly because the agricultural lands are expanding and also people are using the wood for burning and not replenishing it as they should so here's one of my points any method to promote forest is important so how do we promote forests basically what we need to do is have valuable forest products where people can make money and a living off the forests if we have that then people are going to value the force and promote the planting of land as forests okay the other option is parking lots buildings roads agricultural lands which are important to society but we have to have a balance let's go back to the objective of the talk and that was to kind of demonstrate green chemistry principles and the first one I want to really emphasize is that the forest products industry including wood and paper uses a very appropriate starting material sustainable renewable wood and we feel that the value in those products is going to motivate people to keep land in forests that is key to the global health of our of our world at this point I'd like to ask the audience a question and I will step in for this so we want to ask you how you feel about the statement the paper industry is a positive influence and sustainably maintaining the forest land and just get your level of agreement to that and your choices are strongly agree agree neutral disagree or strongly disagree well Richard 45% of the audience agreed 70% strongly agreed 23% were neutral and then 14 disagreed and only 2% strongly disagreed so with that I will turn it back over to you well I think majority of the people on the webinar do appreciate getting valuable products from the forest as a way to promote forest lands and there are some people that are neutral or disagree and I think that there are issues with some forests there's always room for improvement but in general we're doing a good job by using forest products okay let's move on now let's just talk about green chemistry at work in the paper industry what's going on right now that we feel like is green chemistry first of all let's just talk about a modern pulp and paper mill these things are enormous the capital cost is about a billion dollars sometimes environmental permitting could take five to ten years and cost millions of dollars without the certainty of the location of a paper mill so it's a big deal most of the new mills are being built in Brazil because they have a very good forests plantations and then also in skin and avian countries where they're trying to develop bio economies since they're so rich in forests when we look at that paper mill or pulp and paper mill we break it down into Union operations each one of these unit operations has chemical engineering principles and chemistry principles and each one of them is an opportunity to incorporate green chemistry and in most cases that green chemistry is involved in each one of these operations but it's a very complex process one of the reasons why it's complex is because some of those green principles talk about recycling avoiding waste maximizing reactions well they take a lot of operations you can't just have one simple operation that obeys all these green chemistry principles one of the most important parts of the pulp and paper industry is the conversion of this hard solid wood into liberated fibers that we can make paper and what we do is we call that pulping helping is a process where we put chips into a water solution that has active chemical sodium sulfide and sodium hydroxide for the most part and those chemicals we added about 20% weight to weight on wood and the chemicals what they do is they actually are there to dissolve the glue inside of the wood we call that lignin it's a three dimensional phenolic type cross-linked material and it's actually found in the middle lamella in between individual fibers we dissolve that with the chemicals and then we have the fibers and then we have also a lot of dissolved organics so that's the process of pulping very very important to us now this is actually a kind of overall schematic of the pulp and paper processes and I'll start off in the top left where we have logs coming in the bark is removed and we use the bark for fuel so that's not wasted after the logs are debarked we chip them the idea is that we get a uniform width that allows the chemicals to penetrate the the chips in a very homogenous way those chips are added to what we call a digester where we add chemicals to that digester time temperature the chemicals actually dissolve the lignin in the middle and dissolve some of the carbohydrates and we get pulp in what's called black liquor it's black because there's dissolved organics the washing step right here actually separates the pulp that we're going to use for paper making and the weak black liquor that has the dissolved organic sand will follow the pulp here the pulp gets cleaned and screens to remove some contaminants and then what we do is we send it to a bleach plant which will take light brown pulp and convert it into white fiber so brown boxes of course don't use the bleaching process copy paper and printing and writings often use the bleach ink and then after we've prepared our fibers they go onto a paper machine and the paper machine is an actual marvel in itself paper machines actually have tens of thousands of data measurements and control loops it's very commonly known that actually a paper machine Ahmad paper machine has more of data and loops than does a 747 airplane so it's a very interesting process and then we're going to talk about this part of the loop right here from the evaporators recovery boiler in caustic plan let's go back to the pulping operation and what we'll do is we'll just assume that we have one tonne of wood I mentioned that we're gonna put 20 percent by weight chemicals on that after our pulping what we're gonna have is we're gonna have our fibers and dissolved organics and our spent chemicals so what happens is we get about a half a ton of pulp and you might be asking yourself okay well what happened to all the organics and chemicals what happens with those is that they are sent to a recovery boiler we've got about a half a ton of dissolved organics and about 20% ton of chemicals and I will mention to you about a hundred years ago all this organics and all these chemicals were simply dumped into the river we're much much better than that now economically and environmentally so now let's focus on the recovery boiler so what the recovery boiler does is it's really a miracle what that recovery boiler is doing is many many things these recovery boilers are almost 10 stories high they're a marvel of engineering these boilers they actually take the organic material and they combust them in oxygen to produce heat and I should mention that the heat and power that we produce is all renewable and is about sixty to seventy-five percent of the energy we need in a mill very very important we're using green energy here the recovery boilers got another couple interesting things it takes the chemicals and at the same times its oxidizing the organics it's actually reducing the sodium and the sulfur to make new active chemicals so we're oxidizing in one part of the recovery boiler and we're reducing in another we're also in that same recovery boiler they're generating steam and the other thing that we do is we collect pollutants so a lot of particulate and gases we recover do not emit to the environment the latest mills the more modern mills are taking this energy right here combining with hog fuel bark and other forest residuals that it may have laid on the ground increasing our energy so now that's one part of it the energy recovery now the second part is what happens to the chemicals well we have a secondary loop here that actually takes the chemicals from the recovery boiler and converts them into the active chemicals we need for pulping the remarkable thing about all this is that we are recovering 95 to 97% of all our chemicals in other words we're using that sodium atom 25 times we're not just throwing it away after one time we're actually reducing our chemical consumption by 25 times very very good economically and environmentally that was one aspect of green chemistry those recovery loops then second one is the use of enzymes as a green catalysts in the pulp and paper industry so we basically know that enzymes are catalysts that actually use this kind of locking key mechanism in other words we design an enzyme like this one this is xylan ace that specifically attacks a certain substrate now the graph on the right the red right here shows the brightness of the pulp we're trying to target and 89.5 brightness for our pulp and what happens is we had a mill trial where we started to apply this xylan ace to our pulp before we bleached now this is important because typically we use chlorine dioxide to bleach to a certain brightness unfortunately we discharge that chlorine dioxide after we use it but we want to either eliminate it or minimize it and using the end times is actually a very green chemistry way to minimize that chlorine dioxide so what we did here was we starred the mill trial we added enzyme and here is what happened then here's our brightness after the enzyme we start to decrease the chlorine dioxide you can see that we can decrease chlorine dioxide by about 25 percent just through the use of this green enzyme and then what happens is we stop them the trial at the mill and then the chlorine dioxide needs to go up to maintain that target brightness so here's a great example of using enzymes as a green catalyst for our pulp mill now the third example of green chemistry is the biorefinery concept a modern pulp and paper mill we've already discussed produces paper and green electricity what else can we produce we can produce pole hog fuel we can produce steam turpentine different oleic acids fatty acids rosin type acids and even more we're creating vanilla precursors adhesive surfactants fertilizers diesel biofuels and so much more the new modern Mills that are being built and run in Scandinavia are producing lots of biofuels you can see some of the numbers here that are wonderful including co2 emissions of minus 80 percent now I think I've tried to demonstrate some of the principles of green chemistry in that paper industry that exists right now some of these are the chemical recycle loops the bio refinery concepts sufficient in energy aqueous based reaction medium and enzyme applications to reduce energy as catalysts so let's go ahead and ask the audience another question so our second question for all of you is the cycles that were discussed with regards to pulping accomplished which of the following do they recover and regenerate chemicals convert dissolves organics to eaten power all of the above or none of the above to call this a runaway would be an understatement and 95% said all of the above and the rest were kind of suppose between the two or three remain dear so I'll turn it back over to you Richard okay this is where I can compliment our audience as being really smart and attentive excellent I'm glad everybody got that we're using those cycles in a very efficient way so let's move on the next thing I want to talk about is our products we're getting to the point where we're asking ourselves you know single-use products how do we best use those in the world and paper recycling is a keep answer - part of that let's just kind of think about how much paper we use and how much plastic we use paper we're using about 400 million tons per year and 66% of that's recycled if we contrast that to plastic we're using about 350 million only 10% is recycled so what I've done is I've sketched how much paper and how much plastic we use per year so imagine that this these sketches are actually lines of trucks from the nose to the tail wrapped around the world and that just demonstrates you how much material we use it's incredible the amount of material we're using so it's basically 12 loops of trucks for paper and ten loops or trucks for plastic now how does recycling fit in now if you think about it for paper recycling we're recycling 66 percent of all our paper what that means is actually of the discarded paper it's only now four loops that's an incredible reduction for plastic it's nine loops which is a reduction but not as significant so this is why a paper recycling is so important to society now if you look around in the environment what you're gonna notice is that cellulosic materials like paper they degrade very rapidly Plastics on the other hand no they don't they exist for very very long times and this graph on the Left just shows you one example cellulosic materials within 30 days amongst microorganisms in the environment degraded at a hundred percent or so polyester maybe three to four percent basically paper is biocompatible when it goes into the environment it comes part of the environment by being incorporated by microorganisms so the recycling that we do in the United States how does that impact society well one of the things that happens is it reduces landfill so if you look here back in 2000 let's say we had 40 million tons of paper going to landfills now because of the different ways we use paper and the increased recycling what you'll notice now is that in 2016 we've reduced that by half only 20 million tons of paper and one of the major reasons is our increased recycling this graph right here shows the difference between Virgin Container board and recycled container board and basically we've got a bunch of environmental impacts and what you'll see is the brown is the Virgin and the blue is the recycled and you can see the blue has many many reduced environmental impacts now it's important to understand virgin fiber is critically important in other words we can't have recycled fiber unless we have virgin fiber so I'm not saying a limit eliminate the virgin fiber but I'm saying that recycle fiber has another advantages now why can we recycle paper well the real reason is that paper strength comes from what's called hydrogen bonds cellulose and fibers have a bunch of hydroxyl groups on there and and what I'm showing here is the hydrogen bonds between fibers when you have this intersection of fibers in this random paper sheet those hydrogen bonds give the paper strength and in fact very interesting paper is stronger than steel on a per unit mass basis these hydrogen bonds are plentiful and strong however what happens is when you put the hydrogen bonds in water the water actually disrupts the hydrogen bonds between the fibers allows the fibers to release and then we have a very easy recycling when we recycle the paper all we have to do is add water the fibers fall apart we can process them and make new paper what this graph right here shows is that the fibers actually they lose a little bit of strength so these curve right this curve right here is the tensile strength of the paper of the paper making fibers and what we see is that they the paper loses about 20 about 10 or 15% strength but really it levels off and really we can continue to use these fibers over and over and over again if they exist now what does happen is some people might say you can only recycle paper seven times well that's kind of a urban myth what happens is that is based on an estimated yields of eighty five percent in other words what happens is some fibers they break during the mechanical actions and roughly we have a 90 percent 80 percent it's different for different types of grades yield and so if you kind of think about that 85 percent yield then yeah it makes sense that a fiber could experience cycle seven times and then actually statistically probably break up so let's talk about the story about boxes boxes in the United States are recovered at ninety three point eight percent in other words nineteen out of every twenty boxes is recycle only one is discarded an incredible high recovery rate now why is that well it's because the paper industry has an incredible supply chain basically here's a beautiful graph about how we get fibres for boxes in total we have about a hundred and eighty million tons of paper globally that are put into boxes and then the products are used and then their end-of-life and then we recover about 80 percent globally so we recover this and we lose about this much and what we do is we add some new recycled material to that mix so we get a 150 million tons of recycled fiber and 30 million tons of virgin fiber we always need that virgin fiber to replace our losses and then we're back to our hundred eighty million it's an incredible story about supply chain now how is paper recycled it's very simple it's a very green process we take bales of paper we put them in water into a pulp ER the fibers hydrogen bonds disrupt and actually in the pulper we remove large size materials through this screen at the bottom then we use centrifugal cleaning to remove staple and sand we use screening to screen out large materials like plastic films we use the concept of hydrophobicity many inks are hydrophobic and what we do is we use air bubbles to float them out finally we can do washing where we can wash out very small particles like ink and filler and then we use some bleaching and some other things and we get our recycled paper back very nice very compact efficient recycling process here's an example of our recycling process for taking mixed office wastes and making away from home tissue and you can see that we start off with the parts per million of 10,000 of ink and in the end we only have 640 and here's a napkin that you might see at McDonald's copy papers clean to ten parts per million so it's a little bit more complicated than that more steps but the same kind of issue so now we've kind of covered recycled paper couple green chemistry principles that we've covered we prevent waste minimize hazardous products be caught using papers by compatible we're using appropriate starting materials that's recovered papers and we have biodegradable products so let's ask the audience in another question Mike can you take it over our third question for you all is the ability to recycle paper back into paper is mainly because and here's the crisis adhesive in the old paper can be replaced with new adhesive the fibers never lose their strength the paper is held together by reversible hydrogen bonding or the fibers are never broken in recycling and again another run away we have 91 percent of the audience says that is held together by reversible hydrogen bonding so I Richard I'll turn it back over to you that's correct paper is held together by reversible hydrogen bonding it's a wonderful thing if you think about it compared to plastics plastics we don't have that hydrogen bonding the same way we can't just use water to recycle so let's move on now I want to talk to you about a couple advances some of the innovative and emerging green chemistry concepts in our industry what I'd like to talk to you about is nano cellulose nano cellulose is actually taking those microscopic fibers and actually using mechanical action or acid hydrolysis to create nano structures structures that have whit's in the nanometer range well why is this important well if you think about it if we make paper we're actually putting down random fibers and to make a coherent sheet of paper you need to have five layers of fibers now a regular fiber coming out of a tree is about 30 microns in width so that means in five layers we have to have a paper of a thickness of 150 microns now think about it if we could make a film or a sheet of paper with nano cellulose how thick with a paper have to be well nano cellulose let's just say is 30 nanometers in width if we need that same five layers we can make a coherent film out of a hundred and fifty nanometer thickness sheet that's an incredible that's an incredible thing that we can make these coherent sheets with just five layers of this nano cellulose the other things is it's biodegradable its biocompatible it's got a crystalline structure that's important it's got chemical hydroxyl groups that we like all these things make it a very interesting starting material now let's just kind of see where what we can go do with it on the right here we have nano cellulose film structure this is a much wider than five and then we've combined it with a wax a renewable by a bio-based wax and then what you'll see is that we've got a little coating on the top and we have it actually infiltrating our medium now what we're doing here is we're showing water vapor transmission rate one of the things that for plastics has a great advantage over some of the bio-based materials and here's polyethylene and its water vapor tree transmission rate what you'll notice is that if we use our nano fibrillated cellulose and we combine it with some waxes what we can do is get water vapor transmission rates that rival or are better than some plastics mainly with renewable material here's another application for nano cellulose if we think about grease resistant and oil resistant materials what you'll see is that a lot of the products that we use currently have flooring in them so we have these PFOA s they can migrate from the food into the food you eat or if they're disposed of they can go into the environment now the thing about these PFOA s is they're not biocompatible they actually persist in people's body or in the environment for very long times now what we can do is we can replace that fluorinated material with nano cellulose and so here what we're doing is we're showing you nano cellulose material and what we have is a grease and oil resistance test and what we're doing here dr. paul in our labs is actually taking cellulose nanocrystals combining with clay and soy protein so we've got some very very green material starting and making this very interesting structure and what you'll see here is that the result is we have extremely good grease and oil resistance without the chlorinated compounds in this section what I wanted to show you was that we are minimizing hazardous products we're using safe chemicals appropriate solvent great starting materials and we have biodegradable products it's a serve society and give us products we need ok so now I'm going to summarize the last thing I want to do is kind of compare paper versus plastic one of the LCAs that I'm going to use lifecycle analysis is this one with paper plates and cups and what we'll focus on are the cups now what you see from the results from this some of the information that I've put together is that paper or plastic for single-use there are pluses and minuses to using paper let's go through some of the pluses paper is recycled at a high extent there's a in vast infrastructure for recycling the economics of recycling are better promotes forests plastics do not paper degrades in the environment so lots of different pluses but then when you look at the lifecycle analysis in the production of paper the total material in that product is two and a half times greater so a paper cup is heavier than a polystyrene foam cup what that means is that we need a little bit more raw materials and when we have waste in the landfill it's two and a half times heavier so that's a - global warming paper is a slightly less and than that and we're getting better in the paper industry at that all the time water use is higher for paper fossil energy is about equal that is for recycle all recycling and the whole life of the paper paper uses a larger fraction of renewable energy I consider that a plus because we're using wood promoting forests plastic is less expensive in general and people like plastic you've seen those commercials with the guys holding 200 plastic bags at one time it's amazing so they've got great properties there's pluses and minuses we feel that paper is extremely green okay so let's do another poll the audience might can you take it final question for all of you the next time you go to the grocery store which would you prefer to use would be a paper bag plastic bag or a reusable bag 78% said reusable bags 8% said plastic and 14 percent said paper so that I'll turn it over to you one last time I think what it's telling us is the group is very interested in reuse which is a smart thing ok so just kind of summarize paper has some advantages over petroleum plastic type products that is renewable and biodegradable trillium also has some advantage so there's pluses and minuses both ways in general recycled paper has better environmental performance and version but they're all part of the same lifecycle we really need to think about the whole system and the lifecycle another thing I want to leave you with is paper products consume wood and the associate lands to grow it we believe that this is good this is important this encourages more for us it allows people to live off the land with forests there that can be an issue if there's what is not sustainably sourced but much of the world is sustainably sourcing wood and then finally the whole lifecycle of paper is very important Manufacturing end of life even the raw materials and everyone needs to consider both the entire lifecycle for paper and plastic and so what I want to kind of conclude with you is that I've shown you some green chemistry principles and the paper industry and I've hope I've demonstrated to you that the paper industry is working very hard and is very successful in applying those green principles to at the industry I will thank the audience and turn it back over Kemba celebrate Earth Week isn't officially over ACS local sections schools businesses and individuals are invited participate in events in their communities with the common goal communicate the positive role that chemistry plays in the world discover more at the link on your screen or in the chat the 23rd annual green chemistry and engineering conference and the 9th international conference on green and sustainable chemistry will be held together from June 11 through 13 2019 in western Virginia you can join us at this unique event by registering at the link you see on your screen and with that I'm going to turn it over to David to take our first question so I just would like to encourage everybody to make it to the 23rd annual green chemistry engineering conference we're very excited about the theme this year about closing the loop there's a lot of opportunities in green chemistry to apply to closing the loop some real problems Richard as you may have guessed there's quite a few questions that have come up during the presentation I'm gonna try and group some of these so that we get as much covered as possible there are a lot of questions around recycling how much of what we throw in our recycling bins actually gets recycled you know many people say the the recycled materials end up in dumps and not recycled so can you talk about recycling paper and how much paper actually gets recycled and a companion question into that is is that with recent reductions in places to do recycling how has that impacted the whole recycling industry paper that's put in recycling streams basically gets recycled at a hundred percent there's very little that is not recycled it makes economic sense for recyclers to things from the waist and they can get from eat anywhere from $50 to $400 per ton for recovered paper the economics are there for recovery I'm not an expert in all materials but I've heard that like glass for example the cost to transport it and the value that they get from the glass and the process they have to go through doesn't really enjoy the same benefits economically that paper does and I've heard stories where glass is just either refused or not recycled so that that would be my comment there great thanks there's a series of questions around paper as you've pointed out is coated or it is contaminated with other things so for example if you use paper for food it will get contaminated with grease paper that is like a magazine cover has you know very shiny cover to it and so what kinds of things are able to be done for paper you know with that kind of contamination can it be recycled what are some of the challenges so like food type containers that have a lot of heavy plastic coatings they cannot be recycled in that same simple recycling system than I showed either those are either discarded or they can go to specialty recycle mills and those reefs especially recycle mills will have a separate pulper they'll use more temperature more time higher shears and maybe some sodium hydroxide and some other chemicals to help disperse them but in general if it has heavy heavy plastic the water can't penetrate and break those hydrogen bonds and it's not recycled things with grease it's just a lot of our boxes come from grocery stores and the grocery store some of them have wax boxes some have a little bit of grease the paper recycling operations can handle small amounts let's say one percent by weight of grease or something like that but if it gets inundated with batches of just grease and wax-coated things it won't be able to be worked things like magazine covers that have clay coatings with latex Asst no problem to recycle them we just have to pulp them and make sure that the coatings first what are the what is the potential for using more paper paper based products for food delivery and that kind of thing so frozen frozen food applications or other applications okay so I tried to show a couple examples where we're using nano cellulose we're using bio polymers like protein and starch we're using clay if we can combine those in a very clever way we can replace fluorinated materials these fluorinated materials you know if you put them in the microwave lots of heat lots of oil lots of grease a lot of transfer to your food it's very important to society I think that we're breaking through on some very interesting nano and non nano solutions to food packaging so I'm you're gonna see more paper straws you're gonna see more paper contained water I mean it's a no-brainer why not contain wall paper and water and paper so you're gonna see a lot more of those things there's high potential so there's someone with a little bit of understanding of the paper making process and so the question is specific are there any chemicals in the paper process like wet strength resins and similar materials that could be replaced with more environmentally friendly products so what strength additives are reactive additives that are cross linked they give the paper wet strength so you'll see them in soda carrying cases and beer carrying cases and yeah there are potential potential replacements so you know the wood industry has tried to move away from phenol formaldehyde same thing with the paper industry some of these cross linkers are being replaced with reactive starches proteins nano cellulose and other different things to impart temporary wet strength but enough wet strength to maintain the paper through its use phase a couple people brought up a similar issue around the recycling paper process and that is that in making paper initially you use like the waste bark for green energy and you pointed that out but what about in the recycling process because you really don't have access to those kinds of materials so what is the energy and the opportunity for greener energy approaches because you have to dry the paper and so on and so forth exactly so the virgin paper has the black liquor that's available for heating and steam and energy and in recycling we don't have that we rely on electricity from the grid in some cases in other cases we purchase natural gas and we run turbines and actually produce the electricity and have boilers and we produce the steam now just like any other industry those gas-fired boilers we could replace them with biomass the issue with biomass is some of these recycling plants are closer to urban settings and the amount of biomass and how you store it it's just simpler for smaller recycling operations to use natural gas and other types of fuels so definitely that's a place where paper recycling can improve so there was a number of folks that were interested in you know the sourcing of trees and wood and so-called foresters paradox you know the way to ensure long-term stability is to extract value from them but you can counter that argument with you know you're replacing certain amount of forest diversity so how does one manage that paradox the amount of commercial Timberland implantation is a small fraction of the overall forests in the United States and Canada in other countries basically we have lots of forests in in government parks and actually those government parks are actually suffering from wildfires and things like that so to not manage forests is not good to over manage more than what we need in forests is not reasonable nobody's going to do that I think we have a pretty good balance of managed plantations versus natural forests in general we've got to promote wildlife diversity and things like that but as we compare forests the parking lots and some of the alternatives that people might put land into for value a managed plant is actually a pretty reasonable and good place and they're very well and sustainably managed so one of the things that I don't think you talk too much about was lignin so lignin is many times Burt for its energy but can you talk about some of the ways in which people are thinking about use of lignin lignans typically are burnt and we get some fuel value out of that in our recovery Boulder we need that to run our Mills however oftentimes there's excess lignin there's special lignans that are produced and currently right now there are some specialty mills I'd say it's only you know 5% of our industry that are making League no sulfonates and those are basically sold as surfactants and adhesives and other applications that lignin is soluble and we have really great uses for it now what's kind of new is we have craft Mills and we have one here in North Carolina that are actually harvesting the lignin so they they acidify the lignin to make it precipitate and then they press it and they wash it and those kinds of lignans are actually are going to be used for higher valued products things like adhesives and we have some research programs going on at NC State to replace things like phenol formaldehyde adhesives and and put lignin in in there as the adhesives and lots of different other applications that are emerging from lignin a couple people brought up contaminants from paper making like PCBs in wastewater or in the recycling process there are these clays and other chemicals and materials that come out of the recycling process what what happens to those materials all mills treat their effluence and their water effluence are either treated in-house or they're treated using municipal municipal water treatment plants typical Kraft mill will have screens to screen the water then there will be primary clarifiers to remove most almost all of the suspended solids and then after that we've got some biological treat where we might use aerobic activated sludge type processes and what that does is it reduces the organic material in there Bo d and co d and the bugs eat the organic material a lot of mills will have holding lagoons where the bio solids from the microorganisms treatments settle to the bottom and then we have finally clear water that's virgin Mills have that recycled mills typically they will have a clarifier system they might remove bo d or they might send their water to city treatment plants to have them treated everyone recently has become more concerned about impacts of plastics to ocean environment and the question was do you see any analogous type of concern from the paper industry in the ocean environment so one of the research projects I'm doing is looking at actual actually micro fibers that come off clothes when you wash them and basically it's it's a very similar comparison what we get is a lot of the microfibers are polyester and a lot of the microfibers are cotton or cellulose based cotton or rayon and what we find is we've done experiments with ocean water and we see that this cellulose based materials degrade relatively rapidly in the ocean waters polyester basically it's inert it does not degrade basically at all in the ocean so cellulose Ickx in general when they do find their way to rivers and lakes and oceans degrade pretty rapidly with very moderate environmental conditions the paper industry does have some pollutants the bleach plant affluence are treated and then discharged the paper industry is working very very hard to reduce chlorine dioxide and an enzyme application was one that I showed you where we've come from we're doing a great job with those water pollutants PCV somebody mentioned PCBs are really non-existent in the paper industry at this point we had some serious serious problems with them when we had carbonless copy paper and back forty years ago or so we just didn't understand the effect of PCBs in the rivers that's all stopped so you know that there's been a lot of concern about pee Foss in the environment and you know there's this trend to be using a lot of those kinds of coatings in paper you brought up some examples of newer coatings how quickly do you think those kinds of newer coatings are going to be adopted oh yeah I think very quickly and especially with food-contact I think when people start to think about their health and how disposable containers contact food and the oil transfer some of these materials I see paper companies and paper chemical suppliers to the industry working really really hard and effortlessly to make some of these replacements work you'll also start to see some maybe some old fashioned type of technologies we have glassine paper where we can actually press the paper to such an extent to remove pores and prevent liquid penetration in many ways enough I believe that we're gonna see a lot of the old traditional types of making cellophane and things like that saran wrap be combined with some newer technologies like nano cellulose and we're gonna rapidly see changes in the next five years thank you for watching this presentation ACS webinars is provided as a service by the American Chemical Society as your professional source for live weekly discussions and presentations that connect you with subject matter experts and global thought leaders concerning today's relevant professional issues in the chemical sciences management and business