Beginning in October 2019, the silhouette of the Green Bay Broadway (GBB) mill began to change. The first of two 400-foot stacks, a significant part of the Green Bay skyline for decades, started to be removed. The north stack was no longer being used for exhaust after GBB replaced a coal-fired boiler with a new natural gas boiler back in 2015. The mill is installing another natural gas boiler in late 2020 while the remaining south stack is scheduled for removal in 2021. The investment in natural gas boilers, a piece of the $80 million sustainability investments at GBB, helped the mill to decrease its emissions of nitrous oxide by 67 percent and sulfur dioxide by more than 80 percent. When the second natural gas boiler is activated later this year, the facility will be completely coal-free in its operations and will reduce emissions to near zero levels.

Recycling paper was one of the earliest and most important actions individuals and companies took to treat our natural world more gently. But despite great advances in paper recycling, we don’t have enough recycled paper fiber to go around. So, if we cannot make every new product from recycled paper, which products should be made from recycled and which should use sustainably grown new fiber? A new tool is being developed to help answer that question. But first, let’s explain why we need it in the first place. A record-high 66.8 percent of all paper used in the United States was recovered for recycling in 2015, nearly double the rate of 33.5 percent in 1990, according to the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA). This is great news, and it makes paper one of the most recycled products on the planet. click Read More below for additional detail

The Ahlstrom-Munksjö Mosinee plant in Wisconsin is teaming up with Via Separations to pilot a cutting edge energy efficiency project. Together, they are validating Via Separations’ Black Liquor Concentration System, which is driven by an innovation in membrane material and system design. Black liquor is the byproduct from the kraft process when digesting pulpwood into paper pulp removing lignin and other extractives from the wood, to free the cellulose fibers and allow for the papermaking process to occur. The new system will reduce energy requirements for this process, increase mill throughput, and increase production of coproducts which are used as a heating source for the plant. “In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Validation program and Ahlstrom-Munksjö, Via Separations is proud to support this trial. We can reduce the resource requirement per unit of pulp produced by implementing a step change process intensification,” said Shreya Dave, CEO of Via Separations. "At commercial scale, the technology has the potential to provide a 64% decrease in energy demand in the evaporator process."