New Paper | Technology Minister Doug Horner announced $10 million for pilot project.
The newspaper you’re holding might someday be made from mountain pine beetle wood, thanks to a pilot project kicked off by the provincial government.
Alberta Advanced Education and Technology Minister Doug Horner announced this week that the province would contribute $10 million to a $27 million pilot project in Whitecourt to turn logs ravaged by the mountain pine beetle into newsprint.
The mountain pine beetle infested about 500,000 trees in Alberta this year, according to the province, on top of some 3 million last year. The infestation continues to march east from the Rocky Mountains.
“This little villain is no bigger than a grain of rice,” Horner said, speaking at the Alberta Research Council’s Forest Products lab in Edmonton, yet it’s choking the life out of Alberta’s trees and forestry industry. The beetles kill the trees they infest and make the wood unsuitable for most uses, including newsprint. “It’s too dry, it’s too brittle, it’s too blue, and it’s too dirty-looking,” Horner says. “With this project, we have a way of getting value from the beetles’ swath of destruction.... We plan to turn these dead and dying trees into high-grade newsprint.”
The project plans to outfit a paper mill in Whitecourt with sensors developed by the Alberta Forestry Research Institute and the Alberta Research Council. This mill is the only producer of newsprint in Alberta and makes the paper that SEE Magazine, among other publications, is printed on. If they work, the mill workers should be able to use the sensors to tweak production to account for the problems of beetle-killed wood.
Pine beetles kill trees used for paper through a fungus in their mouths, says Ted Garver, head of the pulp and paper group at the Alberta Research Council. The fungus stains wood blue, making for blue paper. Over the last three years, his team developed cameras (known as spectroscopes) that can detect the amount of blue wood entering a paper mill and add more bleach to compensate.
Pine beetle wood also has a lot of pitch, he continues, because the trees produce more pitch to try to flood out attacking bugs. Pitch prevents paper fibres from sticking together. “Imagine if you were to try and make paper with margarine over everything,” Garver says.
His team developed an electronic nose (a gas chromatograph, to be exact) that sniffs the steam produced during papermaking to detect pitch levels. The wood fibres then undergo additional heating and grinding. The team also created moisture detectors to determine when to add more water to the drier wood and modified the pressing process to handle the paper more gently.
B.C.’s experience with the beetle shows that it won’t go away anytime soon, says Rod Stern, president of the Alberta Newsprint Company.
About a third of the wood processed at the plant could eventually be infected by beetles. Without the new technology, the mill would either have to produce poor paper or travel much farther for uninfested wood.
“It would certainly mean many millions of dollars a year,” he says.
His company is putting in $17 million to test the sensors at the plant for three years. Woodlands County, where the mill is based, is contributing $200,000.
The project plans to use the sensors in full-scale production by 2015.
