PaperChain
Green and Digital New Business Models
Information
Europe manufactured 85.1 million tonnes of pulp and paper in 2020. This sector produces 11 million tonnes of waste yearly, some of them difficult to valorise.
Simultaneously, Europe needs a more efficient use of resources. If managed in a sustainable manner, pulp and paper industry waste can become a valuable raw material for other resource intensive industries such as the construction, chemical or mining industries, under industrial symbiosis approaches.
New widespread markets are needed to extend the valorisation operations, reduce the landfilling rates and increase the competitiveness of the industry creating new benefit markets for their waste. This is the key objective of PaperChain.
The project has demonstrated the valorisation of the major pulp and paper industry waste streams in five successful large-scale demonstrators covering technical, economic and environmental aspects:
- Lime ash as concrete filler; slaker grits and dregs as aggregates for asphalt pavements. Waste paper ash as alternative road binder to replace cement and lime in soil-stabilised layers.
- Deinking paper ash, deinking paper sludge composite to replace the natural backfilling of a gabion wall, used to stabilise a landslide near a railway line, make it thinner, and saving gabions.
- Fibre sludge for advanced chemicals based on bioethanol for the production of ethanol derivatives for the Chemical industry (i.e. Paints).
- Green liquor dregs as sealing layer for mining spoil in a mining complex.
