Agricultural wastes (straw) may well be one of the star commodity groups in the not too distant future. And when this occurs watch demand for potash and phosphate shoot off the chart! It will virtually double demand for these fertilizer groups.
----------------------------------------------------------- UPM May Produce Paper From Wheat and Straw in China
By Diana ben-Aaron
Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- UPM-Kymmene Oyj, Europe's second- largest papermaker, may begin producing paper from wheat and straw in China, where a lack of trees has limited output.
UPM, based in Helsinki, bought the right to use a new process for making pulp from agricultural residues, it said today in a stock exchange release. Neither UPM nor the owner of the process, Finnish biotechnology company Chempolis Oy, would disclose the value of the non-exclusive license fee.
Paper has been made in China for close to two millennia from substances such as straw and bark, and wood-based production has relied on imported and recycled fiber. UPM opened a Chinese research center last April to explore the use of fibers not made from wood and is considering building a pulp plant there that would use the Chempolis process with wheat and straw residues.
``Now we have the freedom to explore the capability of the process, but it's very difficult to say how far off commercial production is,'' Markku S. Korpela, a project management director at UPM, said in an interview. The Chempolis process also produces acetic acid and furfural as chemical byproducts, he said.
UPM, which got about 5.2 percent of sales from China in 2006, is the first company to license the patented process, Tapani Kultaranta, a senior vice president at Oulu-based Chempolis, said in an interview. The method is cleaner than others using non-wood fibers and complies with new Chinese environmental laws, the executives said.
