Wood into Paper? Sure. But Paper into Wood? Yup

A new Swedish company said it has perfected a process to turn paper back into wood.

Call it reversal of fortune if you will, but PaperShell, based in Tibro, Sweden has introduced new technology that converts paper into a durable, artificial wood, according to a report in Metropolis, the design magazine. It just showed its first commercial product, a chair from Arper shown at the recent Salone del Mobile furniture fair.

“[As a] tree grows up, it takes the carbon from the atmosphere, and we reduce that tree to paper with a single life,” PaperShell cofounder and CEO Anders Breitholtz told Metropolis. “We should be able to do something much more advanced around this.” 

The magazine reported that PaperShell’s material “possesses a superior strength to wood through intensive compression molding that merges and cross-links paper fibers and bio-resin. The process reintegrates hemicellulose into the substrate to create a dry prepreg that is then cut into blanks and stacked under a large steel press for shaping and trimming. Production waste is turned into biochar as well, setting the basis for a circular economy.”

“You get a component which is 100 percent biogenic. There’s no fossil carbon inside. It’s just natural materials,” Breitholtz said. “By pressing it really, really hard, that’s when you have the paper sheets sort of merge together and become a homogeneous material.”

Breitholtz added, “The interest in our materials comes from all over. What we have learned now is that there’s such a diverse use for this.” 

Image: PaperShell

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