Western Canada has a finite supply of forest resources so the search is on for alternate non-wood materials that can be used to manufacture paper, panels and construction materials.
The answer may lie in agriculture fibres or agrifibres such as cereal straw, hemp, flax and perennial grasses.
Agrifibres are a viable alternative to wood and they offer many advantages.
For example, they can be harvested annually while trees take decades to grow and are more costly to harvest.
The prairie provinces produce an abundance of residual straw from crop production each year, much of which is burned or buried.
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“It’s a small step to go from having limited cost effective uses of straw to developing a whole new industry that adds value,” said John Christensen, a bio-industry consultant.
“It makes sense. There’s market demand and the technology to do it.”
A further advantage of non-wood pulp and paper is the production of wood-free or blended papers that have unique and desirable properties.
Agrifibres also take less time to pulp, or break down into individual components, hence reducing production costs.
There are, however, challenges that need to be dealt with before the pulp and paper industry uses agrifibres such as cereal straws.
“Probably the biggest reason for people not pulping cereal straws on a wide-scale basis is recovery issues,” said Wade Chute, lead of the pulp and paper group at the Alberta Research Council.
“Wood contains less than one percent silica, whereas cereal straw contains seven to 11 percent silica by weight of the plant.”
Silica can interfere with the chemical recovery process used by modern pulp and paper mills.
“The silica causes scaling or coats the equipment with a glass-like substance,” Chute explained.
This substance reduces the efficiency of some equipment by restricting heat transfer, increasing the thickness of the used cooking liquor, making it difficult to pump, and potentially plugging some of the equipment.
“This makes chemical recovery for wheat straw less energy efficient and more costly, and it releases more noxious compounds into the atmosphere,” he added.
Chute is working on a solution to this chemical recovery problem. He has developed a chemi-mechanical desilication process, which uses a mild chemical treatment and a mechanical process to remove the silica from the surface of the wheat fibres before they are used in the pulping process.
Although the system is not yet commercialized, Chute hopes it will remove this technical hurdle so that pulp and paper mills will be able to use more cereal straw in the future.
Straw is also used to manufacture non-structural panels for cupboards and cabinets, said Wayne Wasylciw, technology director of Forestry Products at ARC.
Wasylciw and his colleagues recently developed a machine that splits straw lengthwise with a minimal decrease in strand length and uses the split straw to manufacture oriented split strawboard.
This material is more economical to produce and can be substituted for plywood or oriented strand board.
“We are currently testing the process on a larger scale at a small factory to prove that this is a viable process,” said Wasylciw.
“If the process works on this scale, then it should be able to be scaled up for larger plants.”
Because of its advantages in surface quality, Wasylciw feels that this product has the potential to be marketed where wood-based OSB board is limited.
Backed by funding from the Alberta Agricultural Research Institute, this research, conducted at the Alberta Research Council, the University of Alberta and private pulping mills in Alberta, is helping to make an agrifibre industry in Western Canada possible.
“What needs to be done is to stimulate interest – educate people on how agrifibres can be used, their pulping properties, and the costs required to pulp them,” said Chute.
“We need to work on the economics of the process, apply modern day technology to purify and separate the fibres for commercial use and ensure the fibres are of a consistently high quality so that we can compete with other fibre-producing nations,” added Christensen.
“Once the processing infrastructure is developed, within the next decade or so, (the Prairies) will produce a lot of agrifibres.”
Although there is still much to be done, the benefits to agriculture and the environment are clear.
Farmers will have access to new markets, increasing demand for straw and boosting prices.
“Flax straw is currently worth about $5 per tonne in the field,” said Christensen. “But the world market for clean flax fibre is $1,500 a tonne. That’s a big difference.”
Growing hemp, perennial grasses, and other fibre crops will provide expanded marketing opportunities for the agriculture sector.
Agrifibres, whether used alone or in combination with wood blends, may help ensure long-term stability of the pulp and paper industry by providing a supplemental fibre source, opening the potential for using agrifibres in other industries.
