Smart Additive Manufacturing Towards Use of Recycled Paper Fibers for Producing High-quality Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (FRP) Composites

Smart Additive Manufacturing Towards Use of Recycled Paper Fibers for Producing High-quality Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (FRP) Composites

This project seeks to enable a reliable and high-throughput conversion of recycled paper and paperboard products with contaminants into lightweight, high-strength FRP composites for reuse in industries such as transportation vehicles, furniture, construction, production tooling, etc. The objective of this project is to establish a smart additive manufacturing technology that can reliably produce recycled paper fibers for use in composites with uncompromised performance.

Project Team:
University of Iowa, Impossible Objects, Inc.

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20-01-RR-4038

New Approaches to Improve Deinking Flotation to Increase the Availability of High-Quality, Low-Cost Recycle Paper Fibers

New Approaches to Improve Deinking Flotation to Increase the Availability of High-Quality, Low-Cost Recycle Paper Fibers

This project addresses paper fiber recycling needs. The paper industry in the U.S. replaces more than half of its fiber needs with secondary resources recovered from post-consumer paper and paper products. This project will help the industry to further increase their economically competitive recycling rates to those achieved in Europe by developing more efficient separation technologies that can produce higher brightness fibers by removing impurities more efficiently from spent wood fibers. The project could enable the use of an additional 1.3 million metric tons per year of secondary fiber.

Project Team:
Virginia Tech and Thiele Kaolin Company

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18-02-RR-15

Biological & Bio-Mechanical Technologies for Recycled Fibers to Regain Fiber Quality and Increase Secondary Feedstock in High Value-Added Paper Grades

Biological & Bio-Mechanical Technologies for Recycled Fibers to Regain Fiber Quality and Increase Secondary Feedstock in High Value-Added Paper Grades

The goal of this project is to develop new technologies for removing contaminants from recycled paper to less than 0.5% and to develop technologies for regaining or fiber quality without using only mechanical refining. The new technologies developed will help paper recycling industry to produce much cleaner pulp and higher quality fibers so more recycled fibers can be used in place of virgin fibers in high grade paper. The new technologies developed based on new enzyme applications will also reduce the energy consumptions in both contamination removal and fiber refining process and increase the yield of the fiber recycling.

Project Team:
Western Michigan University, Idaho National Laboratory, Graphic Packaging International, WestRock Company

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19-01-MM-03