Meadow as cardboard: Can packaging made of grass replace paper made of wood? | Knowledge & Environment | '
The organic apples in the supermarket are in a greenish cardboard shell that smells a bit like hay. "This carton consists of 40% green waste, and the rapidly renewable raw material grass conserves resources and the environment," it says.
Behind the innovative cardboard made of grass stands Uwe D'Agnone, owner of the Hennefer company Creapaper in North Rhine-Westphalia. The company produced various products made of cardboard and paper. Then the passionate inventor read that in countries like Indonesia, huge forest areas are cut down every year. Wood is the most important raw material for papermaking. D'Agnone looked for alternatives and ended up haying after a few tries. Together with the agricultural scientists of the University of Bonn, he developed a new product. For the green section of virtually any field is usable.
Grass unlike wood hardly contains lignin. Lignin is a natural glue that holds the cellulose fibers together in the wood but needs to be removed for papermaking.
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"In tree wood, lignin enables growth in height, so the higher the plant, the more lignin it has, so I looked down," says D'Agnone in the ‘ interview.
In order to remove lignin from the wood, traditional paper production uses a lot of energy, water and chemicals. This is another reason why a paper bag is only more sustainable compared to a plastic bag, if it is reused at least eight times, according to investigations by the environmental organization BUND.
Energy and water save on production
For the grass paper, the balance looks better. D'Agnone's company uses no chemicals to manufacture and only one-tenth of the energy needed in traditional paper production. Only two liters of water per ton of grass fiber are used – instead of 6000 liters of water for the same amount of wood as raw material.
The innovative packaging consists to a large extent of hay.
"Per ton of wood pulp there is 510 kg of CO2 emissions," says D'Agnone. "We save 75 percent of it," says the inventor.
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Even compared to recycled pulp made from recovered paper, CO2 emissions in production are 25 percent lower.
The grass is dried, cleaned, cut to the required fiber length and pressed into pellets. These are then stirred into water. Depending on the application, the paper produced in this way can have up to 60 percent grass. The rest – as with conventional paper – consists of fresh wood and recycled material.
"The majority of the pulp is currently imported in Germany, for example from eucalyptus farms," says Nico Arbeck from the Competence Center for Sustainable Raw Materials (C.A.R.M.E.N. eV) in Straubing. Imports come from all over the world, including Scandinavia, Southern Europe and Latin America.
Arbeck sees many advantages in grass paper: significantly less water and energy consumption, a regional, widely available raw material and short transport routes. And so far only compensation areas are mowed, which are not used for agriculture.
"Currently this is no competition for food production," says Arbeck.
Uwe D'Agnone shows different products made of grass paper in his office
Green breakthrough or just for the "eco-feeling"?
D'Agnone's Grass Paper has been honored with Innovation, Environmental and Founder awards, most recently the prestigious Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award, which recognizes technology breakthroughs.
Prof. Jukka Valkama from the Gernsbach Paper Center at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, on the other hand, is skeptical.
"In itself this is nothing new: the paper industry uses many annual plants". For some niche products such as cotton, hemp or jute be mixed. "Grass paper does not bring benefits to the end product, but gives the customer a sense of eco," says the researcher.
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Prof. Valkama has no figures on the eco-balance of production, but he suspects that many substances from the green section get into the water, which later has to be filtered out. Due to the visible fibers, larger amounts of grass paper would also have a negative impact on the quality of waste paper.
"We had to prove to the papermakers that the grass paper is recyclable and can be in direct contact with food, such as containing allergens," says D'Agnone, referring to various certificates that can be read on his website.
In Papierfabrik Scheufelen, greenish grass paper rolls lie next to white paper rolls made of wood.
More than 20 factories in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy are already working with its pellets. Of course, the grass paper is still a long way from pushing conventional paper out of wood. But 90 percent of the applications are also made of grass, says the inventor.
At the Paper Technology Foundation in Heidenau, he tested various recipes for cardboard, cardboard, gift and writing paper. The origin of the meadow you can see the result more or less: Sometimes the "green" look and feel is even desirable. Shoe boxes, shopping bags, fruit bowls, drinking straws, file folders and coffee cups made of grass paper are stacked in D'Agnogne's office in Hennef. For football fans, the company even produces greeting cards from the stadium lawn.
Hay from the region
In the meantime, Creapaper also counts major companies such as REWE, Edeka, Coca Cola, dm, Otto Versand and Norma among its end customers. The REWE Group was the first grocer to test the packaging material and now makes it part of its sustainability strategy.
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"In the future, all relevant articles in the fruit and vegetable season planning will check whether grass paper can be used," it says on the website of the supermarket chain.
In the middle of May, Creapaper opened the first large-scale plant for grass pellets near Düren. This will supply several paper producers between the Bergisches Land and the Netherlands with raw material from meadows in the Eifel. Producers who make a long-term contract with him, D'Agnone also puts a pellet plant directly on the factory premises. According to the Creapaper concept, the hay should come from the vicinity of the paper mill and be processed on site as soon as possible.
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