Israeli development: material for green construction from industrial waste
י
Sheral is not exactly on her own when it comes to forestry and the wood industry in the world, but it is possible that the solution to one of the severe problems of the northern countries will come out of the steaming chert hills of the Middle East. The global paper industry produces tens of millions of tons of waste every year: wood pulp that has no industrial use. Israeli development may solve a significant part of the problem, and produce plastic substitutes and hardened sponges from the waste for a variety of uses including construction, transportation and advanced packaging.
unusual material
The main difference between plants and other life forms on Earth is the structure of their cells. In plants (and certain types of bacteria), cells have rigid outer walls, composed of cellulose. Cellulose is a very long chain of simple sugar molecules (glucose) connected to form fibers. Already in 1949, scientists discovered that the cellulose in a plant consists of two different forms of fibers. In certain areas of it, the fibers are arranged in a unique crystalline structure (that is, ordered patterns that repeat themselves over and over again), while in other areas, chaos prevails - cellulose has no defined structure. This feature allows the cell wall some flexibility, so the cell can expand or contract. Only half a century after the discovery, scientists began to gradually recognize the special properties of the cellulose crystals and realize that it is a material with industrial potential. However, this understanding did not produce new developments, because extracting the crystals from the plant material was a complex and expensive process.
borrowed time
Shaul Lapidot was a research student in the laboratory of Prof. Oded Shusiov in the Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences of the Hebrew University, when he came across the cellulose crystals for the first time. He was engaged in researching the structural properties of resilin fibers - flexible proteins that exist in the muscles of proteins, and give grasshoppers and fleas their tremendous tracking ability. In an attempt to create an improved artificial version of such fibers, he tried to strengthen them using cellulose crystals, and developed an efficient way to extract the crystals from the plant material - by treating the pulp with a strong acid and cooling processes. The result was the receipt of a material known as NCC - Nano Crystalline Cellulose - tiny crystals with properties of plastic. An additional heating process allows the crystals to be cast into hard spongy slabs. These panels can be used as insulation materials in construction, as well as in the transportation industry - buses, trains, vessels, and more. Also, the sponges may be used in the production of advanced packaging. These materials are supposed to compete in the market with foamed materials such as PVC or PET, which are currently produced from crude oil, to be at least as good as them in terms of mechanical properties, and even better from an environmental point of view. "These are durable materials that are produced in a more environmentally friendly process than the existing plastic materials, are more resistant to combustion, and even when they burn, they emit fewer pollutants. Even at the end of their journey, they do not pollute the environment," explains Lapidot. "In addition to that, our products solve a fundamental problem of the wood industry that produces tens of millions of tons of waste every year, and is scratching its head what to do with this problem."
The cash is in the tree
Lapidot and Shusiov founded a commercial company in the Faculty of Agriculture for the development of the unique materials based on NCC extracted from the waste of the paper industry, and the Swedish expert Tord Gustafsson is a member of them. The company - Melodea, received more than one million euros in research grants from the European Union last year, as part of the WOODY program - a program of the Union to solve the waste problem of the paper industry. Through the program, contact was made with the Swedish company Holmen, one of the giants in the field, which is currently investing millions of Euros in the development of the product, in exchange for part of the ownership in Meludaa. "The economic potential with the fulfillment of our full ambitions is almost infinite," says the CEO of Malodea, Yoram Shakdi. "It is about replacing plastic materials and industrial sponges that originate from the oil industry, with products that originate from industrial waste from paper production. So there are millions of tons of raw material every year."
Melodea's planned business model is to sell the technology to large paper factories, so that the plastic production units will reduce the volume of the factory's waste, reduce pollution, and make it possible to produce a product with an economic yield from the waste. Next year a pilot facility for a small-scale production facility is to be built in Israel, and in 2015 the company plans to start operating an initial commercial-scale production facility at a site in Europe.
Comments
Part of the main interest in making plastic substitutes from organic materials is that they will be biodegradable. So many products will release the carbon in them in a relatively short time
All in all, this is positive for the coming era when crude oil will become more expensive (since we have to drill deeper and deeper and reserves of quality oil are dwindling) compared to fuel products and alternative raw materials that will be cheaper due to the improvement of technology. But until then, the human race produces huge amounts of biomass that it does not need, and from what it does need, there remains waste that will still break down and release carbon, and my question is whether it is not worth considering the fixation of the carbon in the waste. Also, as long as we do mine huge amounts of fossil fuels whose main economic benefit is in the energy they store and the plastic products are only a secondary product, then maybe it's worth continuing to consume the classic plastic yes, according to what it seems to me (and I would be happy if someone could provide more information on the subject) Refineries that do not sell the hydrocarbons in the crude oil, which are less efficient as fuel and can be used for plastic, simply burn them, or perhaps vaporize or bury them, and if this is indeed the case, it seems to me better that we consume the same compounds as plastic
In my opinion, in another field, the brine of the desalination plants can be used to produce precious minerals, or to produce chemicals from the brine waste. It is also possible to produce paper from sewage water, or fuel from sewage water.
If you produce from plastic waste, which fixes carbon in the product itself, so if the cellulose were burned or the wood waste decomposed on its own, the CO2 would be released into the free air.
Biomimetics - the materials of the future
http://university.qwerty.org.il/?p=2103
Question: If the current problem of KDWA is the amount of CO2, shouldn't it be worth burying all the wood waste and thus fix the carbon? And isn't it better to use carbon compounds that decompose very slowly in order to reduce the scope of emissions? And if the plans to produce plastic materials from organic sources are really a substitute for oil, what will they do with the compounds found in the crude oil and used as raw material for the petrochemical industry? Won't they just burn them? Or will they be turned into polluting fuels? Perhaps it is better to fix the ethylene for example in mountains of Super bags than to burn it as fuel or just as a by-product?