{"id":43135,"date":"2017-05-26T07:20:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T05:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=43135"},"modified":"2017-05-23T12:28:14","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T10:28:14","slug":"mountains-of-waste-could-lead-to-new-u-s-manufacturing-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/mountains-of-waste-could-lead-to-new-u-s-manufacturing-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountains of waste could lead to new U.S. manufacturing, jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Waste material from the paper and pulp industry soon could be made into anything from tennis rackets to cars.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have overcome one of the industry\u2019s most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste,\u201d said Dr. Joshua Yuan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist and associate professor of plant pathology and microbiology in College Station.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The research was published recently in Green Chemistry<\/a>, the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have been thinking about using lignin to make carbon fiber for many years, but achieving good quality has been an issue,\u201d Yuan said.<\/p>\n

\"carbon-fiber-1\"
A waste material from the paper and pulp industry soon could be made into anything from tennis rackets to cars, according to new findings by Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists. (Graphic courtesy of Texas A&M AgriLife Research)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

About 50 million tons of lignin \u2014 or structural part of a plant \u2014 piles up each year as waste from the U.S. paper and pulping industry, he said. Additional lignin could come from biorefineries that use plants to produce ethanol, yielding another 100 million to 200 million tons of lignin waste each year. Yet only about 2 percent of the lignin waste is currently recycled into new products, Yuan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLignin is considered as one of the most abundant biopolymers in the world,\u201d he said. \u201cAll this waste accumulates, and it will be great to use it for something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuan\u2019s research team has had several successes in making fuel and bioproducts from lignin. But even the biofuel making process leaves a large stockpile of waste. That led them to consider the possibility of making carbon fiber material.<\/p>\n

Carbon fiber is not a new concept. It has been toyed with since 1860 \u2014 mostly for light bulbs originally \u2014 and is known for high strength, low weight and heat tolerance.<\/p>\n

But it has been expensive to produce by traditional means.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you cannot produce quality carbon material, it\u2019s really not useful,\u201d Yuan said.<\/p>\n

So the team examined lignin more closely.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found is that lignin is a mixture of many molecules of many sizes and different chemical properties. Through fractionation, we separated lignin into different parts, and then we found that certain parts of lignin are very good for high quality carbon fiber manufacturing,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

The researcher noted that lignin is a complex molecule, but when the high-density, high molecular weight portion is separated from the rest, it has a uniform structure that allows the formation of high quality carbon fiber.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are still improving and fine-tuning the quality, but eventually this carbon fiber could be used for windmills, sport materials and even bicycles and cars,\u201d he said. \u201cCarbon fiber is much lighter but has the same mechanical strength as other materials used for those products now. This material can be used for a lot of different applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe beauty of this technology is that it allows us to use lignin completely. Basically what we do is fractionate lignin so that the high molecular weight fraction can be used for carbon fiber and the low molecular weight fraction can be used use for bioplastics and products like asphalt binder modifier used on roads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuan envisions a multi-stream integrated biorefinery in which lignin is separated in one location so that a variety of materials \u2014 the high density carbon fibers and the low density bioplastics, along with biofuels from plant feedstock like grasses \u2014 could be made at one facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we are able to use the same biomass to produce different things, that allows the best economic return by being sustainable,\u201d he said. \u201cEventually that would lead to increasing jobs and enhancing rural economic growth.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the entire supply chain is in the United States, which means the jobs would be here. The biomass is grown, harvested and transported here. It would be difficult to ever ship that much waste to another country for production. It all stays here,\u201d Yuan said. \u201cIt would put agriculture production and industry together in a bioeconomy making renewable products.\u201d<\/p>\n

His research is supported with a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technology Office.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Contact<\/h3>\n

Dr. Joshua Yuan
\nphone: 979-845-3016
\nemail: syuan@neo.tamu.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Waste material from the paper and pulp industry soon could be made into anything from tennis rackets to cars. \u201cWe have overcome one of the industry\u2019s most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste,\u201d said Dr. Joshua Yuan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist and associate professor of plant pathology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[6026,10408,11828],"supplier":[15668,11236],"class_list":["post-43135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-biopolymers","tag-greenchemistry","tag-lignin","supplier-texas-am-agrilife","supplier-u-s-department-of-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43135"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=43135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}