Paper Goods Company Is Investigating an Alternative to Trees (yahoo.com) 37
The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced "that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels." Discovering an alternative to conventional wood fiber "could reshape how the company, and the industry at large, manufactures products," according to article.
And the move comes "amid growing pressure on manufacturers regarding their reliance on wood fibre from freshly felled trees," reports The Telegraph. "Campaigners claim that more than one million trees are cut down every day..." Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. "This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise," said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper.
However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.
And the move comes "amid growing pressure on manufacturers regarding their reliance on wood fibre from freshly felled trees," reports The Telegraph. "Campaigners claim that more than one million trees are cut down every day..." Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. "This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise," said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper.
However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
There it is - the stupidest thing I've read all day.
Re:Can't see the forest for the trees (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, low-water-use plants tend to also be slow-growing. That's why they use so little water.
Hesperaloe produces 1.5 kg per cubic meter of water. This is comparable to the water use efficiency of forests used for paper, which is between 1.5 and 4 or so. So this actually requires as much water as trees, if not more. The only advantage, if you can call it that, is being able to plant it in places were trees won't grow.
But the problem is that this also means you'll be cultivating plants grown far apart, none of which produce very much mass per plant without taking so much that you kill the plant (whose roots are likely the only thing keeping the topsoil from eroding). That means you need an order of magnitude more land per unit of crop mass, and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. (Trees get tens of feet tall. Hesperaloe is a pile of long leaves that gets maybe a foot tall.) So the energy consumption involved in harvesting it is likely to also be one to two orders of magnitude greater because you might have to harvest an entire acre worth of red false yucca to get as much biomass as you'd get from cutting down one fully grown coniferous tree in a few minutes.
So you've gotten a little bit more crop land that nobody asked for, and/or saved a bunch of trees that were planted specifically to turn into paper, and in exchange, you've introduced a massively energy-intensive harvesting process followed by some other probably massively energy-intensive conversion process. This doesn't seem like a net improvement to me.
Either that or you harvest it including the root system, and yeah, you've gotten a lot of raw material, but now your topsoil erodes, and you can't plant anything there for a thousand years.
The process itself might be useful in some other context, of course, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
it seems like a solution in search of a problem.
A solution in search of a subsidy?
i bet they're buying them for their water content (Score:2)
And who doesn't want softer toilette paper?
Hemp? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hemp? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Due to climate change we will have to at least start switching the type of trees we plan to ones more suited to extremes of temperature, and higher averages. I don't know if it will be hemp, but probably something will have to change.
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Likely because the proce
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Wonder what is actually 'new' about the process.
Re:Hemp? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it can't grow in the same places, but bamboo into paper is already a thing. And it grows quite quickly in the appropriate environment.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it can't grow in the same places, but bamboo into paper is already a thing. And it grows quite quickly in the appropriate environment.
Some bamboo species are even halophiles, growing where there is low-quality, brackish water and pulp-yielding trees are rare as hen's teeth.
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That was my first (and second) thought as well: Grow bamboo (but maybe not in the Arizona desert).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Bamboo is not native to North America and is an invasive species that is impossible to control when it gets away, and it will. The damage to ecosystems would be immeasurable.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-na... [mo.gov] :
"Giant cane is Missouriâ(TM)s native species of bamboo. It is scattered, mostly in our southernmost counties and the Bootheel. In its low, moist habitats, it sometimes forms canebrakes â" dense, nearly pure thickets. It is Missouriâ(TM)s only native grass that is woody by nature and thus can be considered a shrub.
The stalks, literally bamboo canes, are woody, branched above, and rarely more than 16 feet tall. It grows in dense colonies due to vegetative spre
Re:Hemp? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. you are 100% correct.
Try and find a copy of "The Emperor Wears No Cloths" by Jack Herrer. It has the full timeline and loads of informative tid bits about the efforts to keep Hemp Illegal in the USA and abroad and what people are doing to get those laws over turned.
That one book completely changed my views about Hemp. Well worth the effort to find and read.
Fun Trivia:
One acre of Hemp can produce the same amount of usable cellulose in one year as an acre of Trees every 10 years.
Paper can be made from hemp using Hydrogen Peroxide as a bleaching agent. Environmentally friendly and the paper will last literally Millennia. (oldest paper 450BCE, hemp based)
Du Pont was granted a patent in 1936 to make paper using Sulfuric acid. They signed a deal with Hearst to provide cheap paper for Hearst's news papers. Just as a Hemp based paper was about to become practical due to a new way of processing Hemp stalks.
Hearst did a media blitz against Hemp, only the papers called it by it's Spanish name "Marijuana" and claimed it made Mexican immigrants violent, Blacks disrespectful (they would look a White man in the eye!!), and made White Women want to have sex with Blacks. Hearst newspapers described it as "a devil weed" the Mexican immigrants were bringing into the country.
The word "Marijuana" wasn't part of general English before 1936. But everyone knew about Hemp and that it was harmless and incredibly useful.
In 1936 Popular Mechanics described Hemp as a "Billion Dollar Crop", in 1936 dollars, due to how useful hemp was in just about everything, textiles, food, medicine, and general industries.
The original Levis pants were made from canvas made from, you guessed it, Cannabis. They were so durable the would sometimes be passed from Father to Son.
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And they'll eat your pets, believe me, everyone says so.
Nuts (Score:2)
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Re: Nuts (Score:3, Informative)
This Nonsense Again? (Score:3)
Are we going to have another save the trees campaign.
Of all the environmental issues we have trees are not one of them. We have thoroughly proven that trees for paper and lumber are a completely sustainable resource.
These guys think they may have come up with a cheaper option for their cheap and crappy napkins. And that's fine. But let's not fall for the environmental nonsense again.
Re: This Nonsense Again? (Score:1)
Maybe it's the onset of middle age taking over from knee-jerk skepticism talking, but at this point I firmly disbelieve in total any PR materials invoking any hot topic in the news, lefty news, righty news, and nominally straight news alike.
CO2 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Gemini:
To Muir, dismissing forest defense as "environmental nonsense" and reducing ancient ecological treasures to fodder for cheap, disposable paper goods exemplifies human vanityâ"treating the natural world as a commercial warehouse rather than a living temple.
Should I add a sig: Voted Most Downvoted Commenter?
It's in my front yard. It's unkillable. (Score:3)
Paper Co Engineers cost benefits (Score:2)
Air dry is fine (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Michael is that you? (Score:1)
Switchgrass 2.0 (Score:2)
Anybody remember Dubbya going on and on about gasoline made from switchgrass?
Somehow growing succulents in fragile desert ecologies and irrigating them seems like a dead end.
Maybe they got a government grant.
As someone alluded to above the forest litter causing all these fires may be a good source of cellulose. Betcha robots could make it economical.
Would be great if they could use (Score:2)
kudzu or japanese knotweed. Knotweed honey by the way is great.
Try hemp (Score:2)
It has low levels of cannabinoids, so you would have to smoke a bushel to get high. It grows quickly anywhere, hence its nickname "weed." The only faster-growing plant is Kudzu, if memory serves. But it is politically untouchable. Then again, democracies only last 250 years, so maybe we will get relief soon.