Prospects for Maintaining Strength of Paper and Paperboard Products While Using Less Forest Resources: A Review

Abstract

Paper production requires large amounts of cellulosic fiber, whereas the world's forested lands and croplands have a finite capacity to supply such resources. To deal with likely future pressure on forest resources, as well as to hold down costs of materials, publications examined in the preparation of this review suggest that the paper industry will need to implement several concurrent strategies. In particular, the industry can be expected to view recycling as a central part of its activities. Basis weights of various paper-based products can be expected to decrease over the coming decades, and more of the fiber content will be replaced with fillers such as calcium carbonate. Such trends will place intense demands upon chemical-based strategies to enhance the bonding within paper and paperboard. Based on the literature, further progress in reducing the amount of new forest resources used to meet a given set of paper product requirements will require a combined approach, taking into account various fiber attributes, nanostructures, novel concepts in bond formation, and advances in the unit operations of papermaking.

High-Yield Pulp from Brassica napus to Manufacture Packaging Paper

“…4), suggesting that pulps should not be further refined or, at least, that more PFI revolutions would not be translated into much higher mechanical properties. In addition, further refining, besides consuming more energy, could cause structural damages that limit the performance of the fibres (Hubbe 2014;Gharehkhani et al 2015). This undesired behaviour as pulp is further refined has been also observed for other pulps, regardless of the origin of the raw material and the pulping process (González et al 2012(González et al , 2013Delgado-Aguilar et al 2015).…”

“…Regretfully, paper production requires large amounts of these renewable but finite resources, specifically cellulosic fibres. Thus, the papermaking industry must implement several strategies such as viewing recycling as a central part of its activities and/or increasing the yield of unit operations in pulp and paper processes (Hubbe 2014).…”

“…Fibres suffer from shortening, debris, and hornification. Hornification reduces the fibre's ability to swell, the bonding capacity and, thus, the resulting mechanical properties of paper (Hubbe 2014). The content of impurities in the finished pulps increases, while deinkability, i.e., the ease of deinking, decreases (Levlin et al 2010).…”

Enzymatic Refining and Cellulose Nanofiber Addition in Papermaking Processes from Recycled and Deinked Slurries

“…Moreover, better quality fibers could allow the use of lower basis weights or fillers, such as precipitated calcium carbonate. In this sense, the papermaking industry is forced to implement several concurrent strategies, as recycling is expected to be a central part of its activities (Hubbe 2014). …”

“…The first is due to hornification and it affects interfiber bonding and consequently paper strength. The second process makes sheet formation difficult, decreases paper machine runnability, and increases drying energy consumption (Rashmi and Nishi 2010;Hubbe 2014).…”