Demonstration of high performing, wood-based biopolymers, that valorizes neglected pulp industry side streams and can replace fossil- and food-based polymers including hazardous PFAS chemicals.

BACKGROUND

Unsustainable consumption fuels global warming, ecosystem degradation, and CO2 emissions. There is pressure on industries to reduce their negative environmental impact. Furthermore, geopolitical uncertainty requires economic resilience for a robust European economy. Industries face pressure to phase out fossil-based and food-based materials. Meanwhile, the forestry sector has struggled with a need to improve circularity, resource utilization and profitability. The pulp-mills around the globe have long faced production efficiency issues. In pulping side streams biomass is handled as waste for cleaning, deposit and burning instead of utilized as valuable products. Cellulose production makes use of 40-50% of the wood but most of the raw material biomass, consisting of hemicellulose and lignin, has been hard to process efficiently. Treating these streams as waste is costly for the mills and often becomes a bottleneck due to limited recovery. Hemicelluloses and lignin that are dissolved in the pulping processes make up a large resource that has been difficult to valorise due to its heterogeneous nature. To ensure the required shift from fossil-based industries to bio economy and bio-based industries, there is an urgent demand for bio-based chemicals.

LIFE WOODMER introduces an innovation, WOODMER® - a novel high performing, wood-based polymer, that valorises neglected pulp industry side streams and can replace fossil- and food-based polymers. LIFE WOODMER will demonstrate application of WOODMER® Seal product for packaging applications, more specifically in heat seal coatings. Its cost-effective processing combines enzymes and membrane technology, endowing WOODMER® with unique molecular properties. With applications spanning paper chemicals, adhesives, textiles, and plastic additives, WOODMER® excels in film-forming, dispersing, adhesive and thermosoftening properties, outperforming competitors. It is also verified as non-genotoxic and approved for food contact.

OBJECTIVES

The main objective of the LIFE WOODMER project is to scale up and demonstrate a unique solution for sustainable and cost-efficient wood-based biopolymers (WOODMER® Seal), replacing fossil- and food-based polymers including hazardous PFAS chemicals in packaging materials, adhesives and textiles.

More specifically, the project aims to:

-      Validate the production components and systems for the new WOODMER® Seal product at an industrially relevant scale (~5% of full scale) at continuous, full operating conditions.

-      Validate the WOODMER® Seal performance for various applications.

-     Disseminate and replicate project results to target groups to reach high demand of wood-based biopolymers globally.