Part I: Paper from fallen leaves
The climate crisis, powered by harmful emissions of burning fossil fuels, deforestation, agriculture and heavy industry, is a global problem. While the headlines are dominated by government policies – for example restrictions on emissions and big events such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference – other kinds of response to the crisis are also important – including creative ones involving innovative technology and small-scale startup business.
Every year over 7.3 million hectares of forest are cut down for paper production. We are losing our main oxygen source at the speed of 20 football fields a minute. But what about the leaves that fall in the cities – what happens to them? The average city collects at least 8,000 tons of leaves every year, and the total potential of Europe is over 1 million tons from urban areas. They are generally treated as biological waste and disposed of in ways which can actually exacerbate the problem of climate change. Burning leaves pollutes the air with large amounts of carbon monoxide and also releases benzo(a)pyrene, a chemical byproduct that may also be a potential factor in lung cancer. Moreover the world is moving away from plastic, the need for paper increases, so more trees need to be cut down on the planet.
16 year-old student, Valentyn Frechka, from the Ukraine, dedicated a school project to this issue and, with the help of his chemistry teacher, came up with a new idea to actually use fallen leaves to make paper – thereby eliminating the incineration process and reducing the need to fell forests.
In 2017, after four months of work, which included a series of experiments to obtain cellulose suitable for making paper, Frechka was able to present prototypes of woodless paper on which you could write, draw, print, and which performed well both physically and mechanically.
In 2021, after winning important scientific awards, continuing to experiment and develop the process, the Releaf company was founded. It was a collaboration of Valentyn Frechka and entrepreneur Alexander Sobolenko.
The technology developed by Frechka allows leaves and other green waste to be processed into cellulose, which forms the basis of paper and types of packaging. This material is a direct replacement for primary cellulose obtained from wood, but most importantly offers many advantages. First, sheet paper is fully recyclable and has a biodegradation time of just 55 days. Secondly, carbon dioxide emissions are 78% lower. And thirdly, Releaf Paper contributes to forest conservation by saving 17 trees for every ton of paper produced, also using only 0,066 kg CO2 per kg during production as well as only 0,002 l of water per kg. The startup started test production in Ukraine in 2021, using the services of other factories. In September of that year, pilot sales of several Releaf products began: wrapping paper and paper bags. Later the company started partnership with brands such as LVMH, Chanel, WELEDA, L’Oreal, Samsung, BNP Paribas and many more.
During the search for interesting projects I could talk about in my article I discovered the Releaf company, which was from my home country – Ukraine. It turned out that my mother, a biology scientist, had actually met Valentyn Frechka when he was a student at the DESK- school for young researchers, at the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology NAS of Ukraine in Kyiv. Being amazed by this story of how a 16 year old could take on a facet of climate change with his discovery, I decided to find out more details directly from Valentyn, so I interviewed him:
Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your involvement in the Releaf project?
– My name is Valentyn Frechka, I am the co-founder of the company Releaf Paper, this is a company which produces paper from fallen leaves. We are a company which recycles green waste into value added products. At the moment I perform the network function, I am engaged in all technical functions, it is the selection of equipment, adjustment and control of processes. Also I do negotiations with the contractors and development of new products.
Where did the idea come from? What were the first steps?
– This is a story on the level of companies from the Silicon Valley, the right place with the right thoughts at the right time. It was in 2017, I was doing a project for the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine with my chemistry teacher in my village and we studied the usage of green waste instead of wood to produce paper. One of the key aspects of this project was the originality of the methods, since they were all already known, it had no sense to study them further. However later, apart from the cellulose samples left from the project we had a plenty of grass with fallen leaves, and one day we thought „Why not recycle the leaves into a product, similar to cellulose?“. And we did it, we received a semi-finished product, which was later converted to paper. To gain popularity, we made lots of publications, promoted ourselves in the media, took part in contests and Olympiads. Later this idea grew into a startup, afterwards into a full-grown company with two co-founders, several workers and production at outsourcing.
So, you could say that it all started with a school project and your chemistry teacher?
– Yes.
Could you very simply explain how the processing leaves into paper goes?
– Many people think that we just gather the leaves, grind and glue them together with some synthetic glues. However, this is not true. Leaves, as well as wood, consist of many different little fibers, which are formed with cellulose molecules. I have discovered a method to effectively isolate the right fibers from leaves, which can connect to each other, so together they form paper. We have created the circumstances to produce effectively and get up to 42% of the fibers from leaves. We work with the cities, which have a good infrastructure to gather the leaves, which they later deliver to us. We do not have to burn or waste money on utilization of those leaves, instead we convert them to paper. We separate leaves into single components when high temperature, high pressure and humidity are combined in a right configuration. This method is based on chemical-thermo-mechanical processes. We isolate the fibers and later convert them to paper on a standard paper-machine, used in the whole world. Then we dry this paper in rolls and then the paper is sent to be converted into other types of products.
I have seen your paper used for packaging, for bags and notebooks etc. but can it be used for printing books or documents?
– Actually not, because we do not produce printing paper. People often do not understand the different types of paper: there is a base for toilet paper, a base for tissues, a base for productions of boxes, which is much thicker, there is also binding paper, and it is all called paper. In our case we produce every kind of paper but not the printing one. Of course you can print, draw or write on our paper, and some of our clients like BNP Paribas, a big French bank, use our paper for their own printing, but all the risks with the equipment are taken by our clients. It is possible, but not for commercial purposes.
Knowing that your startup was a success, what was the breakthrough moment for your project?
– It was the moment when the startup got financing of 2,5 millions euro from the European Innovation Council Accelerator, which made possible the future separation from outsourcing and tests and innovations for our products. It also has helped us to deal with an array of questions with intellectual property rights.
Where is Releaf’s largest factory?
– We do not have our own factory, at the moment our whole manufacture is outsourcing, all being located in Ukraine, the biggest part in the city of Zmiiv, Kharkiv Oblast, where we make craft paper for bags and in Lutsk, Volyn Oblast, where we produce paper for boxes and other kinds of packaging. Our company has relocated to Paris, France.
How did the war affect your company? In what aspects? What changed after the Russian invasion?
– We never used war as a reason to gain attention or investments. The only change for us was that we began to work more cautiously and critically, because of war we decided to relocate to Paris, keeping the manufacture in Ukraine and all the juristic aspects in France, so we could get better funding. A startup is not a stable thing, even a change of currency rate can affect it, early on we were quite dependent on it.
What are Releaf’s plans for the future? I recently heard that you are doing an investment round of 16 million euros.
– I would not interpret the news this way, we have a commitment for these investments, but these are long-term plans, not even the 2024-2025 years. Yes, we have a commitment, but at the moment we focus on the current situation, which is a pilot manufacturing capacity, testing and entering new markets. We want separation from outsourcing and many decentralized factories around the world, which will recycle paper with the highest efficiency.
Are you focusing on Europe, maybe North America?
– Yes, we aim, but do not limit ourselves. Also we do the recycling of leaves from the tropical regions, the leaves of pineapples, bananas, but this is a long-time perspective.
So you can convert leaves from all trees, even the exotic ones?
– Yes, but there is a difference: in Europe we work with cities, where they have seasons, we do not work with forests and other lands, but in tropical regions there are plantations, where they grow products monthly, resulting in a lot of waste. These are big territories, where every month they have a lot of biomass, because of climate, it produces a lot of methane emissions, and we try to make a positive impact from the pre-existing industries with our strategies. You will not be using pineapple leaves to grow new ones, but it is possible to make paper from it.
So in tropical regions you work with the farms?
– We have contact, willing to implement our strategy in the future.
How do you see the future of the manufacturing industry? Will it be possible to produce without harming the environment?
– Answering the question from the end – no, because manufacturing and consuming something without any harm is impossible. It is a goal, but an unachievable one, because always taking from one place, we lose in another. Nevertheless we can minimize our impact where this is possible. The paper industry grows every year just as the need in packaging paper grows, so this industry has a 2030 strategy, which includes a complete refusal of fast plastic and substitution with paper, not the usual one, but woodless. In well-developed areas, for example the US or Europe, almost all forests are certified, but there are manufacturers who use illegal schemes to cut down the Brazilian forests, which is catastrophic. It is a trend in industry to balance the need in consuming with debit of raw materials, going in two directions: the recycling of straw, sugar cane, bamboo, leaves, grass, other green waste available in big quantities, and the production of nanocellulose, bioplastics on the base of cellulose, polyurethane. We fit quite nicely with this trend.
And one last question, do you have a message for the readers of the article?
– A message for the youth: less TikTok, less alcohol, less parties and more focus and creativity, because it is a valuable resource to develop as a personality and produce valued and useful things for our society. We live in a world, where a lot can be replaced with technologies, and the further the more cherished will be the personality aspects. If you want to reach something, be the creator. We are at the crossroads of sciences that shape our future.
Part II: Clean energy from chicken feathers
Another example of environmentally helpful scientific discoveries is the joint project of researchers at the ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University Singapore, who have managed to generate clean electricity from chicken feathers. Each year 40 million tons of chicken feathers are incinerated. Such waste generates not only dangerous amounts of CO2 emissions, but also produces toxic gases such as sulphur dioxide. Having undertaken extensive research in the field of turning food protein waste into sustainable technologies, the lab of Raffaele Mezzenga – a professor of food and soft materials – from Zurich, Switzerland and the lab of Professor Ali Miserez at NTU at Singapore have now found a way to put these feathers to good use. Using a simple and environmentally friendly process, they extract the protein keratin from the feathers and convert it into ultrafine fibers called amyloid fibrils. These keratin fibrils are later used in the membrane of a fuel cell.
„Fuel cells are emission neutral and renewable, provided clean H2 is accessible, and proton conductive membranes can be efficiently synthesized. One of the biggest problems associated with conventional fuel cell technology is the very high cost of the membranes and the harsh chemical synthesis processes used to produce them. Our work produces membranes from natural materials which have zero starting cost and can be made using mild, environmentally friendly chemistry. Compared to other renewable energy technologies with zero emissions, such as solar photovoltaics, our technology has (much) cheaper starting raw materials.“
– Raffaele Mezzenga in interview
At the moment the project is searching for investors, mostly talking to the private sector, but willing to talk with anyone who is interested. Professor Mezzenga believes that young people, in particular, should be enthusiastic about solutions such as this.
„The challenge the young generation is facing is how to feed 8 billions people with as low a carbon footprint as possible. In this context, food waste becomes a sin we can no longer afford. Any solution towards reducing food waste and/or GHG emissions has to be pursued by any possible means. Our technology does both things at the same time and I can only hope it will serve as inspiration to the youngest people, on whose hands the future of our planet lies.“
