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Review
. 2023 Oct 4;16(19):6548.
doi: 10.3390/ma16196548.

Industrial Hemp as a Potential Nonwood Source of Fibres for European Industrial-Scale Papermaking-A Review

Dariusz Danielewicz  1
Affiliations
Review

Industrial Hemp as a Potential Nonwood Source of Fibres for European Industrial-Scale Papermaking-A Review

Dariusz Danielewicz. Materials (Basel). .

Abstract

The suitability of industrial hemp (IH) as a source of fibres for European industrial-scale papermaking, including, in particular, European kraft pulp mills (EKMPs) (i.e., plants producing the predominant amount of virgin pulps in Europe), was discussed, considering the causal, cultivation, technological, and application aspects of this issue. The work showed that there are generally premises for using straw from nonwood crops in European papermaking. As for the IH, it was found that IH stalks are the best IH fibrous raw material for EKMPs. There are a few cultivation factors favouring the use of IH stalks in them and a few, though important (e.g., small cultivation areas), factors not conducive to this use. Most technological factors favour the use of IH stalks in EKPMs, apart from the large differences in the length of the IH bast and woody-core fibres. The analysis of application factors indicates lower usefulness of IH stalks than wheat, rye or triticale straws, stalks of Miscanthus × giganteus, Virginia mallow, and kenaf. This is due to the much greater availability of these cereal straws than IH and less variation in the fibre length of cereal straws, Miscanthus × giganteus, Virginia mallow, and kenaf than in IH stalks. The main conclusion from the conducted query is the statement that the presence of IH varieties with fibre lengths more similar to wood would reduce the number of technological and application factors unfavourable to their use in EKPMs and increase the competitiveness of hemp straw vs. wood as a raw material for European large-scale papermaking.

Keywords: application aspects; causal aspects; cultivation aspects; industrial hemp (IH); kraft pulp mills (KPM); technological aspect.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Production of pulp (blue line), paper, and paperboard (red line) in the years 2009–2021 (artwork of the author based on [8]).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Cross-section of the IH stalk [101] (a), distribution of bundles of primary and secondary bast fibres in the cross-section of hemp stalk (b) [101,102,103,104], as well as the structure of IH technical bast fibres (c) [102] (c) (b,c—author’s drawings based on [101,102,103,104]).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Fibre distribution of pulp from IH bast (author’s drawing based on author’s results from MorFi apparatus, TechPap).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Fibre distribution of kraft pulp from IH stalks cut into 0.3–0.6 mm sections (author’s drawing based on author’s results from MorFi apparatus, TechPap).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Digester (total) yield of unbleached kraft pulps from: IH stalks (Hs) and IH woody-core (Hw) kraft pulps, birch (B) and pine (P) kraft pulps; and alkali-oxygen ECF bleached IH bast fibres pulp (Hbf) [101] (author’s drawing based on author’s results).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Comparison of the tensile (a), tear index (a), bulk (b) based on results presented in [94,96,98,114,115,125], and bulk and light scattering coefficient (c) of handsheets of paper prepared from unbleached and bleached Hs, Hw and Hbf pulps (author’s drawing based on author’s results [101]).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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