CALGARY — Vulcan, Alta. is updating the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale about spinning straw into gold.
The central Alberta town is getting a processing plant that turns wheat straw into fibre.
The straw will be processed into dietary fibre and sold to the American bread-making industry. The $5 million plant owned by a British Columbia company called Arbokem Inc., has orders due for delivery in March, said Vulcan town manager George Balash.
In the United States, wood or cotton pulp is sometimes added to bread for fibre. A new U.S. labelling act comes into effect this spring demanding all food products fully disclose all ingredients. Food processors are backing off wood and cotton and switching to wheat fibre because they fear a consumer backlash, said Balash.
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Only the beginning
Arbokem president Al Wong, who also invented the process, says the Vulcan plant is a prototype for what he hopes will become a network of agri-pulp factories across the Prairies.
Each year Vulcan will extract 3,000 tonnes of wheat fibre from 6,000 tonnes of straw.
He has also formed an alliance with a group in Manitoba that is looking at turning cereal grain straw into paper. The paper would be similar in quality to computer or photocopy paper. The Manitoba project has received money from the federal government, Arbokem and local investors, said Wong.
Another project in the works involves blending this pulp with de-inked paper, which would make it stronger than similar recycled papers on the market now, said Wong.
