The Big Green Research Machine

Scientists at the USDA’s Forest Products Laboratory are creating new uses—and potentially new markets—for scrap paper and paperboard.

By Robert L. Reid

Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.

Like modern-day alchemists, researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) in Madison, Wis., are working to turn common wood-based materials such as scrap paper into far more valuable products. Only instead of pursuing the lead-into-gold route, FPL’s research seeks to turn OCC into building materials, transform undeliverable mail into new envelopes, and recycle ONP and scrap office paper into plastic clothes hangers, cart wheels, and paint brush handles, to name just a few.

FPL’s recycling efforts are even completing a kind of organic lifecycle by turning scrap paper—produced from trees, naturally—into biodegradable mulch mats for reforestation projects. That’s a particularly fitting end result, given that FPL is under the U.S. Forest Service and thus strives to both use and preserve America’s green
resources.

“We believe that for every tree you cut down, you don’t just use it once,” says Ted Wegner, assistant director of wood, fiber, and composites research programs at FPL. “We want to extend the utilization of wood-based material, and recycling is a key factor in that.”

And, of course, each time FPL researchers discover a new use for secondary fiber, they also create a potential new market for paper and paperboard recyclers.

From the Lab to the World

FPL, founded in 1910, is located on 22 acres adjacent to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and employs more than 100 researchers in its mission of “improving the use of wood through science and technology” in order to conserve and manage U.S. forest resources. The lab receives an annual budget of approximately $18 million, of which roughly $1.8 million—or 10 percent—is devoted to paper recycling issues, Wegner says. Paper recycling projects also draw on an additional half-million dollars a year in grants and cooperative agreements with private corporations, he notes.

FPL researchers pursue their alchemy in the lab’s 47,000-square-foot pilot plant. This fully equipped operation features pulp and paper equipment that allows researchers to demonstrate papermaking at speeds up to 100 feet a minute. The lab also contains pulp processing and recycling equipment such as a slushmaker/ pulper, flatscreens, centrifugal cleaners, flotation units for deinking, sidehill screens, pressurized screens, hydraulic presses, and drum washers. FPL also has on-site bleaching equipment, a paper testing lab, and corrugated fiberboard processing equipment, as well as machinery for manufacturing test products made from secondary fiber.

FPL’s research projects are generally based on a charter that spells out the particular issue that a group of scientists—both chemists and engineers—will work on over a five-year period. And even though FPL’s research is conducted in a laboratory setting and in small batches, the ultimate goal is to spread the knowledge to the wider world. As Deb Dietzman, FPL’s public affairs officer, explains, “We’re not a paper mill or a saw mill, so we need to transfer the technology from federal research to commercial efforts.”

To that end, FPL patents some of its research and issues licenses to companies that want the exclusive right to manufacture products based on the research, with the lab receiving a royalty in return. (For more on FPL’s licensing requirements, see “Get Your Research Here” on page 102.) In fact, the emphasis on doing research that can be commercialized begins at the start of each project. “Our goal is to focus on those areas where there’s an identified need to balance societal needs with industry’s needs and identify where the information gaps are,” Dietzman notes.

In addition to patented/licensed research, FPL also engages in cooperative research and development agreements with individual companies or consortiums of companies, universities, and other government organizations. The cooperation may be as simple as sharing staff, or it may require a monetary contribution from the parties. It may even involve the sharing of proprietary information from the participants, information that’s much easier to obtain and protect nowadays thanks to the Technology Transfer Act of 1986, Dietzman says. Prior to that law, the federal government was prohibited from keeping such industry information secret.

 FPL also conducts research using just its own appropriated funds, Dietzman adds. This type generally involves “cutting-edge” approaches that may not currently be of interest to industry but that could attract outside support later on.

Handling a ‘Stickie’ Subject

So, what kind of recycling projects does FPL work on? The lab certainly doesn’t take the easy route. As Wegner explains, “We look at what big blocks of recoverable paper are not being reused and try to identify the technical barriers to using more recyclables.”

For just one example, consider the issue of adhesives, or “stickies,” as the paper industry calls them. Stickies are the residual adhesive that stays with the pulp from envelopes, stamps, labels, and stickers. The problem with stickies is that they clog papermaking equipment during recycling and prevent roughly a million tons of paper a year from being recovered and reused, according to Said Abubakr, supervisory chemical engineer.

To unstick this situation, FPL is working with papermakers, adhesive producers, equipment manufacturers, and the U.S. Postal Service, which purchases 20 percent of the adhesives used worldwide, Abubakr notes. So far, FPL research has helped produce a self-adhesive postage stamp that’s designed as an alternative to traditional gummed stamps and that’s reportedly easier to recycle. Among its features, the stamp, introduced on a test basis in March, is linerless—that is, it’s produced in a roll like Scotch tape rather than on backing paper.

In addition, research from the linerless stamp project is proving helpful in another adhesives/Postal Service project currently under way. This effort focuses on producing a more environmentally benign adhesive that would enable paper producers to more easily recycle undeliverable mail into new paper products. Westvaco Corp. (New York City) is one company that’s exploring this opportunity on a test basis, producing new business envelopes using a 50/50 mix of virgin paper pulp and recycled mail, Abubakr notes.

Going to the Office

 Once those recycled envelopes are available, we’ll need some recycled office paper to go inside them, won’t we?

Not surprisingly, FPL has two projects aimed specifically at recycling scrap office paper, which is often difficult to recover because traditional chemical deinking methods have trouble with the toner inks used in photocopiers and laser printers.

FPL’s first such project—enzyme-enhanced deinking—treats the recycled pulp slurry with a commercially available mixture of enzymes, then sends the slurry through a flotation process, explains John Klungness, an FPL research chemical engineer.    Already successful on a pilot scale, the enzymatic approach has moved up to an industrial-size test run by an Atlanta-based deinking firm and should be available commercially fairly soon, Klungness predicts.

The other project—fiber loading—was patented by FPL and licensed to Praxair Inc. (Chicago). Fiber loading allows cheap, inorganic fillers to be substituted for some of the fiber in pulp, ultimately producing a stronger paper that uses less pulp. Praxair’s technical partner, Voith Sulzer Paper Technology North America Inc. (Appleton, Wis.), received a $281,000 U.S. Department of Energy grant to develop an energy-efficient method to fiber-load recycled scrap office paper. The project is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fiber loading for manufacturing precipitated calcium carbonate filler, which can be used to enhance brightness and surface properties in recycled pulp.

Exploring Spaceboard

 Of course, not all FPL research focuses on clean white paper. The lab has also found ways to transform more contaminated—and thus hard-to-recycle—paperboard into value-added products.

One of FPL’s most fully commercialized examples is Spaceboard, a three-dimensional, honeycombed structural product manufactured from molded recycled paper fibers. “Spaceboard can tolerate contaminants—such as glass and plastic—that you can’t have when making paper,” says John Hunt, research general engineer. That’s because the Spaceboard process, developed in 1988, uses a waffle-like resilient rubber mold that is undamaged by the presence of contaminants during pulp-molding, he explains.

FPL received five patents for inventing the process, and currently two companies have licenses to make Spaceboard products. The first, Sonoco Products Co. (Hartsville, S.C.), is licensed to produce packaging products and should have a pilot plant up and running this summer, Hunt says.

The second licensee is Gridcore Systems International, a Long Beach, Calif.-based company that’s touted as one of the brightest stars of FPL’s technology transfer story. Architect Bob Noble founded Gridcore after reading an article about Spaceboard in an FPL journal. Today, Gridcore owns exclusive licensing rights to produce Spaceboard for a wide range of uses, including building materials, shelter systems, furniture, trade show exhibits, point-of-purchase displays, set construction for movies and theater, even components in recreational vehicles, such as countertops, flooring, and wall systems.

Though Gridcore has made its Spaceboard products out of everything from ONP to mixed office paper to old shredded hundred dollar bills, its principal raw materials are OCC and linerboard, which produce honeycomb panels with better production times and bending strength, explains David Saltman, vice president of marketing and sales. Gridcore manufactures the panels and sells them to other companies that form the panels into displays with curved walls and flat surfaces, Saltman says. So far, he notes, the company has sold its panels to customers making displays for firms such as Sony, Mattel, the Gap, and Nike, as well as set pieces for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a new motion picture version of “Doctor Doolittle.”

Gridcore currently has the capacity to manufacture 20,000 square feet of panel products a day, employing some 60 people and consuming 10 tons of recycled paperboard daily, Saltman notes. Business is so good, in fact, that the company plans to double its employee base over the next year and add a second plant that will consume an additional 30 tons of recycled fiber a day.

In return for its license, Gridcore pays FPL an annual fee and a royalty based on sales. The company also invested around $2 million in additional research and development, beyond the work done at FPL, to bring its product to market.

Mixing Paper and Plastics

 Some of FPL’s other success stories have one foot outside the scrap paper and paperboard realm, focusing on making products out of paper and plastic composites. An especially attractive feature of such compounds is that the secondary fiber, such as ONP, can be combined with scrap plastic from detergent containers, ketchup bottles, and similar sources, notes Craig Clemons, chemical engineer. These compounded products, which are composed of 20 to 30 percent plastic, are turned into pellets or pressed into boardlike panels, explains James Muehl, forest product technologist.

Natural Fiber Composites, founded in Baraboo, Wis., in December 1996, is one company commercializing a paper and plastic composite. The company plans to use 1.5 million pounds annually of ONP and other household scrap paper to make paper/plastic resins for use in injection and extrusion molding products such as toys, automotive parts, cosmetic packaging, and more, says Mike Ford, general manager and vice president of marketing.

Aeolian Enterprises (Latrobe, Pa.), another company pursuing this niche, is planning to market plastic lumber made out of ONP and other scrap paper combined with polyethylene. In addition, the company has found that ONP/polyethylene pellets are a good blowing agent—that is, they can help make plastic products stiffer without adding weight and thus could replace more expensive chemical agents, says Bill McClintic, the firm’s president.

FPL had cooperative research agreements with both Natural Fiber and Aeolian, but neither company holds a license from FPL and thus neither pays royalties for using the research.

What’s on the Next Page?

 The future of recycled paper research at FPL is easy to predict, according to Deb Dietzman. “Recycling will continue to be a strong area here,” she notes. “As public demand grows for wood products and we continue to have concerns over where the fiber source is going to come from, then the need to use it more efficiently will continue.”

Sometimes, recycling even benefits indirectly from FPL research. For instance, a non-chlorine bleaching project being developed for virgin fibers allows papermakers to pulp at lower temperatures. The resulting paper would have more flexible fibers and thus could be easier to recycle, notes Rajai Atalla, head of chemistry and pulping research.

But tough issues also remain. Roger Rowell, an FPL team leader working with a project in Alaska to produce construction materials with recycled paper, is concerned about the lack of construction codes for such products. And Peter Ince, an FPL economist, points to the volatility of prices for recycled paper and paperboard, noting that OCC rose from roughly $40 a ton in the early ’90s to nearly $200 a ton by mid-decade, only to fall back to its earlier lows last year.

But no matter what the future holds for paper recycling, the industry has taken great strides in the past decades, thanks in part to FPL’s research. “Twenty years ago,” notes Wegner, “recycled products were bottom-of-the-barrel, with almost no recycled material going into higher value, premium paper products. But now there’s greater acceptance of recycled material in all paper grades. In fact, people want to see recycled material in the products they buy.” 

Get Your Research Here

So you want an exclusive license to use patented research from the Forest Products Laboratory?

Well, you’d better get ready to fill out some forms. And don’t expect that these licenses are issued on a first-come, first-served basis. Licenses are granted to the applicant with the best ability to commercialize the technology.

In selecting licensees, notes Janet Stockhausen, patent adviser for the U.S. Forest Service, the lab tries to “pinpoint things like: Will the applicant actually do the work or will it be a joint venture? How much money will it cost to launch the venture? Where will the money come from—borrowing? grant proposals? How many years will it take to get the product to market? What will the cost per item be? And what is the expected profit margin?”

That last item is particularly important since the federal government uses the licensee’s expected profits as one factor in determining what royalties the company must pay to receive the license, notes Stockhausen. And while waiting for those profits to start rolling in, the government keeps track of the licensee’s progress toward actually producing the product. “If the company says it will take three years to get the product to market,” she says, “then at three years, we look to see if they’re there.” The government also requires regular sales updates from the licensee and commands a minimum annual royalty whether the company ever produces a product or not. “The incentive is there to get the product in the market,” Stockhausen states.

All royalties—both the minimum amount and sales percentage—are negotiated on a case-by-case basis, and the information is treated as proprietary.

Licensees must agree to substantially manufacture the product within the United States, and their license must not create antitrust problems. Also, licenses do not extend beyond the life of the patent, previously a maximum of 17 years but soon to become 20 because of international trade agreements. •