The biggest hope for Canada’s struggling forest industry could be something very small with a big name — nanocrystalline cellulose.
It’s nanomaterial — in simplest terms, a product derived through engineering at the molecular scale — derived from wood fibre.
Nanocrystalline cellulose, or NCC for short, has yet to make an impact on the marketplace, but in a few years companies could find commercial uses in goods as diverse as lipstick to SUVs because of NCC’s properties such as strength and toughness, biodegradability and ability to “tune” colours without dye.
And governments and industry are hoping it could be part of a new Canadian bio-economy producing nanomaterials and other products derived from the forest, as the traditional pulp, paper and lumber sector copes with high costs and low demand triggering mill curtailments and closures.
NCC was a topic of discussion at an international conference on nanotechnology for the forest products industry being held in Edmonton until Friday called Unlocking the Potential of Nano-Enabled Biomaterials.
“We are witnessing the forestry equivalent of going from analogue to digital,” said Annette Trimbee, deputy minister of Alberta Advanced Education and Technology.
“If lumber is the analogue form of wood, then nanocrystalline cellulose is the digital version,” she told delegates on Wednesday. “Imagine a bio-reactor that produces clean energy using a nanocrystalline cellulose membrane.”
Alberta Advanced Education and Technology is spending $9 million over three years to set up a bio-materials development centre to develop new bio-products, she noted.
One of the first commercial opportunities of NCC will probably be in films and coatings like paints and finishes. They could be on the market within two years, said conference speaker Jim Dangerfield, executive vice-president of FPInnovations, a research co-operative for the Canadian forest industry.
“NCC brings improved characteristics so you get a hardwood floor that wears twice as long,” Dangerfield said in an interview. “That’s just one of the areas we’re going down and we’re going down that one because it’s directly related to the forest industry, but some of the others are really amazingly exciting.”
FPInnovations is exploring NCC’s potential to be used in advanced building products, recyclable components for vehicles, coatings and filler for papermaking, bioplastics, fibre-reinforced composites, bio-materials for repairing bones, pigments for cosmetics and membranes that conduct electricity.
So far, it takes about a tonne of kraft pulp to harvest 115 kilograms of NNC; a pilot plant produces one kilogram a day.
“Tomorrow it’ll be higher, but the bottom line is you can pull that stream out of your normal pulping process and put it in here. I can see a time when you’re making pulp, you’re taking some of it and putting it into NCC. That product is probably worth 10 to 15 times what the price of the pulp is. And you’re taking the waste from making the nanocrystalline cellulose and you’re fermenting it to produce ethanol. “It’s basically about how do you capture more value out of that fibre.”