S9E1: Can Maine lead a revolution in consumer goods with nanocellulose?
Transcript
Ron Lisnet: Hello, and welcome to “The Maine Question” podcast. I’m Ron Lisnet, and I’m thrilled and honored to once again be the host of this show. This is episode one of our ninth season, and for those of you who have tuned in before, you may notice some changes around here. We’ve mixed things up a bit.
For those watching us on UMaine’s YouTube channel or another social media outlet, the studio we are in will be our new home and the flagship of sorts for our podcasts. This space will allow us to add an enhanced video‑based production to the podcast, bring in multiple guests, and allow us to use visuals to help tell the stories that we share.
We’re not forgetting those of you who listen to audio podcasts only. We will still have those available on the traditional platforms we’ve always used, Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. We may add a few others along the way as we move along this season. We’ll keep you posted.
On to our first episode. Our topic today is a really small one, but one that could have a huge impact on the Maine economy and just about every aspect of modern life as we’ve come to know it. Today we are talking about nanocellulose. Let’s dive right in to that.
Well, we’d like to welcome you all here. Appreciate you joining us. Maybe if you can introduce yourself, tell us your title, and maybe just a sentence or two about what you look at, what’s your focus here with work you do at the University of Maine. Mike, let’s start with you.
Mike Mason: Sure. My name’s Mike Mason. I’m a professor in chemical and biomedical engineering at UMaine. I’m also the Associate Director for the Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering.
My lab is primarily interested in defining physical properties at the nanoscale. Historically, that hasn’t meant biomaterials, like what we’re talking about here today generally with cellulosic kind of materials.
In the last few years, I got excited about this material system, just like everybody else, and so now we’re looking at different ways that we can modify surface, look at properties on short length scale, and utilize that to make new materials.
Ron: Colleen, you’re with the PDC. We’ll get to what that means, but just tell us a little, who you are and what your title is.
Colleen Walker: I’m Colleen Walker. I am Director of the Process Development Centers. We are a center in chemical and biomedical engineering. We work primarily with industry and do contract research for industry.
Ron: Great. Mehdi?
Mehdi Tajvidi: My name is Mehdi Tajvidi. I’m an Associate Professor here, Renewable Nanomaterials is my official title. What I do is that my job is to find applications for nanocellulose that Colleen produces…
Colleen: [laughs]
Mehdi: on a large scale.
Ron: Right, so she’s the supplier and you…?
Colleen: Yeah. [laughs]
Mehdi: Yeah. [inaudible] to find the customers.
Ron: Thank you so much. I thought to try to describe what we’re going to talk about here, it’s a little bit daunting because it’s such a huge topic and there’s so many different ways we could go, so I thought what I’d do is read from the article that Ashley Forbes did in this “UMaine Today” magazine from a couple years ago, talking about nanocellulose.
I think it really sets the scene for what we’re going to talk about. This is Ashley Forbes, her introduction to the article. She says, “To understand what nanocellulose is and what it could be, all you have to do is look at the world around you.
” That tree outside your window, the plants in your garden, the seaweed on the beach, the lettuce in your salad, that’s where it comes from. In the very fiber of every plant and tree is a building block like no other, with the potential to be the next material that changes the world.
” Think about the introduction of nylon, polyester, or plastic, but this foundational material, nanocellulose, is natural, biodegradable, abundant, and renewable. To narrow it down, start with your basic needs, water, food, shelter. How could nanocellulose factor in?
” Filters made with nanocellulose could remove contaminants to provide clean, safe drinking water. Packaging made with nanocellulose offers properties that can keep food fresher longer. Materials made with nanocellulose could form the structure of your home, and at least some part of nearly everything in it.”
It reminds me of that “Saturday Night Live” commercial way back, with Dan Aykroyd or Chevy Chase. I can’t remember, but they used to do those commercials, rip‑offs of commercials, and one was like, “It’s a floor wax. It’s a dessert topping. It’s both.”
Colleen: [laughs]
Ron: Is there anything that this can’t do? Let’s just talk about it. What is nanocellulose? Break down the term, nano and then cellulose. Nano is really small, but how small is it? How small are we talking?
Mehdi: You want me to take on that?
Colleen: You take on that.
Ron: Yeah.
Mehdi: I give this example. I say, “One human hair is almost 100 microns, on average, in thickness, and then 100 microns is 100,000 nanometers. Basically, you can fit 100,000 nanometers in the thickness of one human hair.” That’s the scale we’re talking about.
Ron: Wow. Cellulose comes from all the plants and trees around us, right?
Colleen: Yes. It’s the most abundant natural polymer in the world. It’s in grass, trees, everything that we grow. We can make this…Nanocellulose, then, is common in all those materials.
Ron: Talk about the size. Mike, maybe you could talk about that. The size of the fibers, does that matter? Why does it matter? Is that what makes this material so versatile?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Like all nanomaterials, whether we’re talking about bio‑derived nanomaterials like cellulose, it’s a lot about the physical properties that are unique or become really significant by reducing the size of the material, which is what we do. We’re taking fiber, which comes from pretty much every plant source that you can imagine and reducing the size.
Imagine it’s like a rope, where you’re peeling off strands that make up the rope. You end up with something that has a ton of surface area. Along that surface area, there’s all kinds of chemical groups, and predominantly oxygen and hydrogen.
Because of all that extra surface area, it becomes a very reactive surface, a surface that you can modify. It can react with itself in different ways, and because of that, it’s very versatile.
It can be maybe even smaller. When we think of cellulose, you look it up, you get a picture of a molecule. What we’re talking about is not molecular cellulose. It’s actually a collection of polymer molecules.
In the polymer molecule itself is a bunch of little sugar units, so it’s a chain that we’re then coiling into a fibril. Then those fibrils in nature make up fiber and bigger fiber and then plant cell walls and then tree.
Ron: We’re probably going to have some acronyms coming up here. Nanocellulose is an umbrella term. I’ve heard CNF, I’ve heard nanofibrils and nanocrystals. Can somebody untangle that for us here?
Colleen: [laughs]
[crosstalk]
Mehdi: I’m teaching these courses…
[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Mehdi: Basically, there are two main types of nanocellulose. One is cellulose nanofibrils or cellulose nanofibers, or CNF. The other one is cellulose nanocrystals, or CNCs. Depending on where you come from in the world, you might call it differently, but those are the two main ones.
The nanofibrils are the ones that are normally produced mechanically by the fibrillation of the structure of the plant cell wall into smaller particles, whereas the CNCs are the ones that are mostly made by chemical or acid hydrolysis, by removing the impurities on all the amorphous parts. You end up with the crystals that are the building blocks of making the plant cell wall.
Ron: In the intro, we talked about, this’s basically all the necessities of life. It seems like this material can have an effect on that. Talk about some of the uses, packaging, medical, building materials, filtering water. Can this material really do all of that very effectively? Anybody.
Mehdi: It’s a big question, so we can break it into parts. I can talk later, after other people talked about their application, but I can talk about building products and maybe a little bit about water filtration.
Ron: Mike, let’s start with you. We’ll get into some show‑and‑tell and dive in to more specifics later, but your basic area, what can nanocellulose do for what you’re working on?
Mike: I would say it might be useful for a lot of things. That’s what we’re trying to understand is what it actually is useful for.
The fact that you’re starting with something that already is like a fiber, means that you can think of it as a fiber‑reinforcing material because it’s covered with hydroxyl groups that like each other. It likes to stick to itself, which means it’s like an adhesive. It’s a like structural element and a glue at the same time.
It’s a polymer, which means a lot of different things. It’s not necessarily the same as common plastics that we’re used to because it’s not necessarily what we’d call thermoplastic, which means you heat it up and it melts and you can reform it.
It doesn’t necessarily behave like that, but it has some of properties of all of those things, reinforcing materials, adhesives, and fiber network‑like materials, like you would use for filtration and stuff like that.
As far as what I’m looking at, I’m looking at essentially applications in the health/medical space, including dental and veterinary, where there are current materials that are maybe over‑engineered out of metals or petroleum‑derived plastics that are meant to live forever.
We’re moving towards a lot of single‑use materials in healthcare now. Over‑engineered materials means that they’re meant to be used over and over and over, but single use is contrary to that definition.
We’re saying, is this a material system that is biodegradable? It’s made from a biological source that’s heavily managed. It’s a sustainable source material, wood. It’s not a food product. We don’t have to take corn to make stuff. We can get it from trees, which is great. Is it just right for the application, but only that application? We’re broadly looking in that space.
Ron: Colleen, what have you looked at in terms of applications for this material?
Colleen: We mostly focus on paper and packaging applications. That’s where the process development focuses. There, it’s a really easy add‑in because papermakers are already using cellulose fiber to make paper and packages, like your regular boxes, so it’s very easy for them to take this technology.
They can pull a slipstream from their regular manufacturing, make the cellulose nanofiber, and add it back in. They can displace fiber, if they choose to do that, to make the same product, or they can actually get an increase in some of the properties to make an enhanced product in that.
Ron: People think of paper, they think of printer paper, but there’s paper that wraps up your hamburger when you go get takeout, or any other number of uses. There’s a lot of applications just within the realm of paper, right?
Colleen: Exactly. Some of the unique properties that this material has is, it’s great at providing grease resistance. That’s something, an area where Mehdi works as well and has great oxygen barrier properties. Those are two things that plastic…properties that plastic provides.
We’re really excited about looking at this material to see in food packaging particular and some other packaging applications where we can leverage those properties with this material.
Ron: Now Mehdi, what are you looking at? I know a lot of forest products and enhancing those, right?
Mehdi: Yeah. My background is in wood and paper science and technology, so I belong to the forest products community. My main focus is to give back to the community. I’m thinking nanocellulose is coming from forest, so how we can get it back to the forest products industry. We all know about the issues that forest products industry is facing.
I see nanocellulose as a enabling technology that can actually enable new products and innovation in the forest products, and also it can enhance properties of the current products that we have.
One of the issues with traditional, compressed panels as we call them, like particle board and fiber board is the synthetic resin that is used there, normally contains formaldehyde, which is not good. One of my early focuses was to look at how we can replace that synthetic part of the forest‑based material, which is the resin and replace it with nanocellulose.
As Mike mentioned, it has very good binder applications or properties. We took that one first and then developed that ideas into all different types of building products because we realized that some products are easier to attack. Some others are more difficult to get to.
Then in the meantime, we were working with other people like Doug Bousfield, at chemical engineering department who were working on coatings and those things and realized about the excellent oxygen and grease barrier properties.
We were thinking how we can get these together, and then we got back into packaging world again. From building back to the packaging, so that’s where I am now.
Ron: Just to break it down, and we’re going to have some show‑and‑tell later with you as well, but the glue which used to have some pretty nasty stuff in it like formaldehyde is now made from wood products and is totally recyclable.
Mehdi: Yes. It’s basically wood that is binding wood, so we are using the same wood to bind particles of wood together to make something.
Ron: These are all promising ideas, but the holy grail, of course, is to develop this into a business and an industry and products. Let’s talk about the opportunity to develop products and technology here in Maine. Is Maine uniquely situated to do this? Do we have the infrastructure? We have paper mills all over the state. Is Maine situated to go big with this?
Colleen: That’s like a leading question for my perfect answer.
Ron: Have at it.
Colleen: I’ve been at UMaine for about five years when I first arrived, and I’ve worked in this nanocellulose space for a number of years.
When I got here, I was like, “This is Nanocellulose Valley,” [laughs] because when you look at the researchers on campus, like Mike was working with it, and Mehdi was working with it, like in Silicon Valley, you have that university that has all this knowledge.
Then you look at the community around Maine. What does Maine do? We are experts here at managing our forests and getting that wood out of the forest. We have that workforce. It’s just like why Silicon Valley grew up, because they had the people and they had the knowledge.
I think the other thing that makes Maine unique to grow in this space is because a lot of Mainers have a great entrepreneurial spirit and they’re really fond of doing something that’s green and ripe for the planet and the land. I think that makes Maine unique.
You can see that. We have a lot of people, the University of Maine using this material, a lot of interest around the communities. We just hope to see that grow.
Ron: Anybody care to add?
Mike: I’ll add something to that. For some applications, a lot of what Mehdi does, and I’d say some of the biomedical applications that we’re looking at, the scale of potential demand gets to the point where it does make sense to look at former mill sites, making use of some of the infrastructure in the state of Maine that is on the verge of collapsing in some places.
Those sites are ideal. They have cheap energy, they have all that infrastructure. There’s some sites that potentially have some of the existing equipment that we can use, and that’s maybe where we source a lot of the raw materials that we need. We could co‑localize some of these small ideas around those spaces taking advantage of all that forestry infrastructure.
Ron: I want to get back to the idea of a bio‑refinery. We’re going to talk about that later, but when you talk about Nanocellulose Valley being a stepchild of Silicon Valley, how big can we dare to talk about this? Is that really reality that this could become a major industry here?
Colleen: You hope. Like all things, you hope, but the potential is so huge and there’s so many people looking at this material all around the world. It’s not just Maine. It’s all around the world that people are excited, and there’s the bigger pool because now people are looking for sustainable materials.
People want to move away from plastics, want to move away from these more harmful components. Again, we have that knowledge here. We’ve been working in this space for a very long time, so you can easily see that that would grow up and we could have this vibrant business around this material.
Ron: What are the hurdles that are in the way of that? Obviously, more research has to be done to develop the products and the technology. What else? Investment? Workforce? What else are we talking about that we need?
Colleen: Do you want to take that?
Mike: I can jump on that one.
Ron: Mike, please do.
Mehdi: That’s the point that they are asking about. [laughs]
Mike: I can tell you that there are a few promising products that are still at what we would call bench scale or maybe small demonstration scale that are close to being ready for something interesting to happen, but we don’t have the resource backbone to do that. We don’t have CNF at scale.
We don’t have some of the technologies to change its shape or form to like dried CNF. There’s one hurdle that’s tricky for us and that’s, how do you go from CNF that’s made as a suspension in water that’s almost all water, it’s like 97 percent water, or let’s say 90 plus percent water?
How do you get that all the way down to zero water? It’s very expensive. That’s a hurdle at scale. That’s something that, honestly, we need help with.
Colleen: We’re working on. There’s projects up.
Mike: We’re keeping moving on that, but ultimately that could take some sizable investment.
Mehdi: On the other hand, there are applications where we call wet applications, where you don’t have to draw in the nanocellulose before you use it in the final product, and that’s one area that I’m mostly working on.
Ron: Great. The PDC, we were going to get back to that. Just talk about what the PDC does. You talked about it a little bit, but right now you are making a lot of nanocellulose for Mike and Mehdi and others to use. How much are you able to make and what part does that play in what the PDC does?
Colleen: We’ve just done upgrade to our pilot plant, so now we can do, at a very comfortable level, we can make a half a ton a day, which is not pushing the barriers. We could make a lot more of that if we wanted to work longer than eight‑hour shift say.
The PDC has made about close to 30 tons of this material dry tons. We’ve shipped it all over the world for commercial trials, which is pretty exciting. The PDC provides that role so that we can supply large quantities for companies that want to run on a commercial scale for them to try that product. We’ve been doing that for a long time.
Ron: I know a while back we were visiting you, and there was a company trying to make yogurt cups, right?
Colleen: Yes.
Ron: Just think how many yogurt cups are thrown away, plastic every day. That alone would be a huge market, right?
Colleen: Yeah, and that’s looking at the molded pulp space, but we’re really excited to look how we can take the cellulose nanofiber and put it into those products because a lot of people are looking at that technology to move from plastic to a paper solution.
Ron: Because right now, a paper cup, [laughs] it wouldn’t last in the store or in your lunchbox probably, right?
Colleen: Right.
Ron: Let’s maybe dig in a little bit on some of the products and the technologies that you’re both are working on. If you want to pull out some show‑and‑tell here, Mike, maybe let’s start with you. You talked about biomedical applications.
Mike: I can do it in the meantime.
Ron: Go ahead.
Colleen: [laughs] I have show‑and‑tell too. [laughs]
Ron: That’s right.
Mike: Let me just start by saying that, interestingly, a lot of biomedical applications don’t differ a lot from other commercial applications, other than the material has to be shown to perform in a certain way in that setting.
A lot of what we do is about, how do we prove that it starts out sterile or is it sterilizable? Can we track the lifetime of the material before it actually makes its way into that product? That just raises the bar, but it’s structurally very similar. You’ll see a lot of similarity.
Let’s see. I have a few. Again, these are all medical applications. This is a foam fiber material that is used for biological spills. Essentially, it’s a sponge. It’s a single use. You throw it on a wetted area surgical suite, it sucks up all the biofluid.
This particular one is just neat, which means it’s nothing but fiber, but we also make them with antimicrobial properties as well as part of that material system. This is just a cleanup thing, you could say.
That same idea, we use for materials. This is like a bulk sheet. This is like a raw product. This is part of a device that uses something that wicks fluid intentionally. Analogous to a pregnancy test, which is a lateral flow membrane, which the fluid moves along the surface and through the surface as well. This is part of something along those lines.
Again, same technology, this is the actual membrane for a lateral flow pregnancy test. Again, all just wood. There’s nothing but wood in any of those. A little more technical. This is our attempt, and I’ll say this is an ongoing project sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
We’re building a replacement to polyurethane foam for which there’s something like close to a million tons thrown in landfills a year just for medical uses. This is something that’s used to make a surgical support.
Let’s say you’re having like neck or back surgery or shoulder surgery where they need to immobilize you, they use a huge amount of really low‑quality polyurethane foam just to lock you into place so you can’t move. This is like a bench‑top scale version of that material. It’s just like a foam but single use only. Unlike polyurethane, it doesn’t last forever.
Ron: Is that compostable?
Mike: Yeah, you could eat that.
Ron: [laughs]
Mike: There’s nothing in that but cellulose.
Ron: Wow. That’d get your daily fiber.
Mike: Maybe more than you want.
[laughter]
Mike: Moving down that same pathway, the same technology that we use for those materials, rather than expand it as a foam, if we design in a way that it condenses upon itself, we take advantage of all that hydrogen bonding, we end up with materials that are very rigid.
This is a machinable material designed to make a component that you would use for maybe like a therapeutic device. Maybe even as far as a surgical implant someday, I would say. That’s a raw material.
Along that same line, given that this is an FDA‑compliant process if we were to do that, we also have a material that surgeons use to train for surgeries that is morphologically and structurally similar to bone. It feels the same. It cuts the same. It drills the same. It looks the same. That’s a training tool. These are basically like bone.
If you look on the inside of these things…Let’s see if I have one you can look on the inside of these things. I’m not sure I brought it with me. No, here it is, the crummy ones. Here’s a piece of that material that’s basically like an analog to bone. This is what it looks like on the inside. It looks like the trabecular part of bone that’s all wet.
Ron: It’s like a broken bone?
Mike: It’s like a broken bone. We intentionally break everything. We have to prove that it’s tough like bone. These are all been mechanically tested. These are examples of a bone plug.
If you have a diabetic neuropathy where they have to cut out parts of bone because of disease, you can plug it with the hole sawed off. It will help bone cells regrow. That’s another pretty high‑end application.
Ron: That’s not going to be rejected by a person’s…
Mike: I’ll say hopefully not, but that’s where we are with the research. That’s where we are. Is, how do we ensure that that isn’t rejected because it’s a foreign body within you, but also chemically because it aligns with what your body needs to grow cells and to make cells happy? That is where the science is, I would say. That’s the tricky part.
That same material, if we don’t necessarily dewater it, meaning we leave it as a suspension of gel, these are hydrogel beads that are meant to be implanted as a vaccine delivery vehicle. It’s a depot for drugs.
This is part of a couple projects that are going on with the USDA, a couple other collaborators of Cooperative Extension working with aquaculture, for example, and also some dermal applications, so shallow skin abrasion, small wounds, not what we’d call a large wound, for example.
Ron: To deliver medicine, basically?
Mike: Yeah. It’s a little payload, and this one’s injectable. This is a sheer thinning liquid that you can inject it and it becomes a fluid, and then it gets firm once it’s in position, so it stays put. That’s what those guy…That is not loaded with a drug. That’s a dye that we use to track how well it works.
Let’s see, what else? Some other examples of some rigid materials similar to these. There’s some like rib bone and some other examples that we would mock up. One of the things that is in this whole conversation is not just 100 percent cellulose materials, but using cellulose as an additive in things like thermoplastic.
That I think has a lot of promise for early adoption. Right now, we can use medical grade plastics, very high‑performing materials for very specific applications, and we can replace 20, 30 percent of that plastic with cellulose. That’s an easy adopting material. You’re not asking industry to change anything.
We’re going to send you an injection moldable resin that’s ready to go tomorrow. That’s an example of something where we just need to get to scale.
Ron: Is that the advantage of that, other than it’s a natural material is cost or efficiency or what is the advantage?
Mike: We do get a little bit better improvement in some mechanical properties like stiffness. Again, you’re adding fiber to something that’s otherwise pretty amorphous, so you’re adding it like a reinforcing material, which means in some applications you can use less plastic.
You can make something thinner and still have the same stiffness characteristic. To answer your question, yeah, it’s because it’s greener, that’s part of it, but sadly, if the price point isn’t in the right ballpark, that’s just not going to happen. The way we get there is to go to scale.
Ron: Mehdi, what do you have to show us here?
Mehdi: Can I use which space? Can I…?
Ron: Yeah, let’s clear some space here so you can…
Mike: He’s got the big stuff.
Mehdi: I didn’t bring the big stuff. [inaudible]
[laughter]
Mehdi: My story goes back to about 2014 when we wrote a grant to U.S. Endowment for Forestry & Communities, also known as P3Nano, and asked for funding to use nanocellulose or CNF basically as a binder to replace the urea‑formaldehyde resin in panels.
They got back to us and said, “That’s a great idea, but how on earth are you going to get all that water out of this material? It’s 97 percent water.”
I honestly did not know the answer, so I go to my lab and I get some of CNF in my hand. I try to squish the water out and it doesn’t do that. Water just stays there. It holds so tenaciously to water and then I mix it with some wood particles, which was the plan. Then I see the magic happen, just pure water flowing from between my fingers.
Now we have a name for this phenomenon, we call it contact dewatering. It’s basically the process that changes all that bound water, which is closely interacting with the surface of the nanocellulose changing that into free water.
It is mechanically removable, so that helps a lot with the process because you can take about 50 percent of the water in a few minutes without using heat energy. It makes it really interesting to do. We started that project making particle board panels. Particle board is made with wood particles bonded with a resin, normally urea‑formaldehyde.
The first samples that we made were just one inch by one inch because we didn’t know how to do that. Then we scaled that up to something like this. This is a particle board panel made with nanocellulose as a binder.
That one has about 15 percent nanocellulose in it, the rest is just wood. There is no other additives. Then we just scaled that up with the help of people at the Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. We did larger sizes that’s one foot by one foot.
Then we used the four by eight feet per panel press at the composite center at the ASCC at UMaine to make one panel, which took us about six hours to produce. Six hours to produce one panel. Again, it was all for the proof of concept. It worked really well. The properties were similar or better than regular panels.
The problem was that the particle board is actually a dry process. You can’t go to the manufacturer and say, “Hey, change your dry process to a wet process and do this.” That’s not going to fly. We were looking for another application that use a wet process, and that was gypsum board or drywall.
Ron: Wallboard?
Mehdi: Yeah. That’s a wallboard application now, so it’s similar thing. We have the same core of the material, but these faces are now like paper, so similar to a wallboard. This one, you can make wallboard much lower density, lighter and stronger.
At the same time, it has one of the benefits that wallboard doesn’t have. If you ever tried to put a nail in a wallboard, you see that it can easily come out, that doesn’t happen with this one. That’s one of…
[crosstalk]
Ron: Your pictures won’t fall off the wall?
Mehdi: Yes.
Ron: Good.
[laughter]
Mehdi: We are looking at how we can take these ideas and scale this up. We have a good collaborator from the industry that allowed us to scale this process up into fiber board production. We did it in the smaller scale. We made fiber boards like these.
These are low‑density installation panels. This is another sample of that. This one has only 2.5 percent CNF as binder, the rest is just wood fibers. It is similar to the installation panels that are being made here in Maine now commercially.
Ron: The wood is gluing the wood?
Mehdi: Yes. Wood is gluing back to wood. Just recently back in April, we worked with our industrial partner and we made these panels. These are commercially made on an actual line. Within that six hours that it took us to make…
Ron: The first one.
Mehdi: one panel, we actually made 5,300 of those panels in six hours. That’s the scale that now we are at.
Ron: Is that close to a commercial rate?
Mehdi: That is the commercial rate. That’s where we are with the nanocellulose application as a binder in wood‑based panels.
Ron: These are all building materials that are used every day, every house, every office, any structure you build needs this kind of thing.
Mehdi: That’s true. In line with that, again, as I said, we have been always been impressed by the properties of nanocellulose as a grease or oil barrier. Some years ago, we were thinking how we can take this idea and make it into another application that takes advantage of both, both binder and barrier properties of nanocellulose.
That was when they thought about the packaging application, molded fiber as like how you mentioned. Basically, if you get this one and make it thinner and replace this surface paper with nanocellulose, you end up having this material now.
This is a molded fiber container that does not use pulp to make molded fiber. It uses wood flour or sawdust, and that sawdust is bonded together using nanocellulose, and then you have a layer of CNF on the surface to give it grease barrier performance.
Ron: This could be waste wood that is not coming from trees that are going into lumber, it’s coming from…?
Mehdi: Yeah. At this time, waste wood is just burned, but you can technically use it to replace pulp, which is unpriced comparison, is very different.
Ron: If I wanted to go get sushi takeout tonight, it could eventually come with this as the container?
Mehdi: Yeah. The oil resistance of nanocellulose is so good that it’s beyond barrier. It’s actually a container. We have had samples of oil in a cup that we made in the lab sitting there for six months and oil was there.
Ron: Never leaked.
Mehdi: Never leaked until I tipped it over accidentally.
[laughter]
Mike: Not technically.
Ron: There’s nothing can fix that. Colleen, you have some goodies to show us?
Colleen: Do you have time for demonstration?
Ron: Sure.
Colleen: What I brought is some of the paper, and it’s a great lead Mehdi did, to show you the grease barrier properties. This is a piece of paper that’s been coated with cellulose nanofiber, except the edges are not coated with the cellulose nanofiber. Here, I just got some Mazola corn oil.
Ron: Oh, boy.
Mike: Good oil.
Ron: Let’s make sure we can get a shot of that. Is that in a place, guys, that we can get?
Colleen: I can move that.
Mehdi: I can remove this or…
Ron: Let’s take some of this out. Should we put it in the middle of the table here?
Colleen: Yeah. It’s just fun to see. If we put a drop on these edges where it’s just a normal piece of paper, you can just watch it go right through. See what’s the paper, and then this top surface is the CNF on it. You’ll see, just sits there.
Ron: Look at that.
Colleen: That’s just the cellulose nanofiber, no chemicals, no other additions, and maybe it looks like it might have a little bit of holes.
Ron: Let me ask a question. There’s been a lot of talk about PFAS and that material is used to do this function. Now, we don’t have to use PFAS for this anymore. Correct?
Colleen: Right. It’s an exciting thing to look at. How can we use this cellulose nanofiber to add those grease barrier properties that PFAS used to take?
Ron: PFAS, we’ve talked about that in other podcasts, and of course, they’re known as forever chemicals, and they’re not good to have in the environment and they’re everywhere and they become a big problem.
Colleen: I don’t have a demonstration for it, but another application that we’ve been supporting is one of our researchers at the Composite Centers looked at using cellulose nanofiber as an element to extinguish fires. Believe it or not, you can throw some cellulose nanofiber on a fire and it’ll put it out and it will not restart. It was pretty exciting.
Ron: It’s amazing. Wow.
Colleen: Then the other thing I wanted to show you, one of the things that the Process Development Center does, is we distribute cellulose nanofiber around the world for people to develop applications. We work very well with the folks at University of Maine, but we distribute it to other places around the world that want to look at it.
Lucy have some very unique things to bring in now because these struck me when the third artist walked into our facility and wanted to buy cellulose nanofiber. I was blown away when that happened, but the artist community, and this is one of them from Walter Greenleaf, he’s doing a NFA.
This is another piece, some pieces that you can see from artists. This is from Marchelle Simms that has made this from cellulose nanofiber. Artists get extremely excited about this material because for them, it’s something that they can stick their hands in, they can work with, and they don’t have to worry about any types of toxic components or volatile elements.
It’s really exciting that these people get terribly excited about this because they see the shapes that Mike shows with his products, they see the shapes that Mehdi shows, and then their artistic brains get going, how else can we use this material? I just think it’s really exciting to see some of these pieces.
Ron: Let’s talk about recycling and the source of this. All of this is basically compostable or can be ground up and reused again, right?
Colleen: Exactly, yeah.
Ron: There’s no waste, there’s no landfill problem. None of that enters into the picture.
Mehdi: The samples that I showed you, these ones, you can actually put them back in water and then fix them up and get your fibers and particles back and then form them again, make another plate. You can technically do that.
Ron: In terms of all, we touched on plastic, it’s everywhere in our…It’s in the oceans, it’s in just about every place you look. Does this material have in many instances the ability to replace plastic in our lives, single‑use plastic like you talked about?
Mike: In some applications, yeah. Its properties are super unique. There’s no doubt about that. It doesn’t necessarily perform the same way as a lot of what we think of as plastics. A lot of plastics, you can heat them up, melt them, reform them.
They are plastic because they’re deformable, and some applications of cellulose that’s true. Some plastic products, yes. It’s easy to see how there’s replacements, but plastic is also a pretty amazing class of material.
Colleen: It is.
Mike: The bar’s pretty high. If we can use this material, targeting single‑use applications, and then ask the question of, did we really need a material that’s designed to last for 100,000 years for something that’s going to be used for four minutes?
Mehdi: That’s very true.
Mike: Massively over‑engineered, most averse. Polyurethane, like the examples I was showing, we produced, in a single surgery, like three or four garbage bags of foam polyurethane. It always takes up that much volume. Even if you sterilize it before you ship it to the landfill, it’s still this huge volume of material.
This stuff you put in water just goes to nothing. It takes up a square inch or something for a bed‑sized piece of the foam material. Certain applications, it’s really great.
Polyurethane is marketed because it’s great and it lasts forever, which is why we use it for cushions and things like that. Why do you need something that lasts forever for a surgery that lasts 15 or 20 minutes to a couple hours? You don’t.
We’re using it because you can say, “This is a great, high‑performing material.” We just need something that does its job. That’s it. In applications where we can target single use, short‑time use, or something that doesn’t need to be a component on the space shuttle, I think there’s a lot of low‑hanging fruit.
Ron: As we talked about one of the hurdles to this, moving forward is making enough of this material, right?
Colleen: Mm‑hmm.
Ron: If some of these products you talked about become a marketable item, and a company needs, I don’t know, five tons a year or something, is that one of the hurdles that needs to be cleared? We need somebody to make this material on a scale that could provide the resource for an industry to grow. Is that a hurdle that needs to be cleared?
Colleen: I guess you would say yes, because right now, if people need material to run trials, they have to come to us. We need somebody to go ahead and plate that first manufacturing site in so that there’s a place where they can come and purchase material.
The PDC we supply that need for people right now when they’re trying to develop their applications with that. It’s one of those chicken‑and‑egg things. We have to get the markets ready and then have to find the right site to put that facility, hopefully in the state of Maine.
Ron: I wanted to ask about students. How is this being taught or talked about in classes that are being taught here? Are some of the engineering and other students going to be able to work with this material? They’re the ones going into the future that are going to be coming up with the ideas and executing on all these, right?
Mike: Mm‑hmm. Mehdi teaches a class on cellulose. I should let him probably answer that.
[laughter]
Ron: Please do.
Mehdi: I teach a graduate course on nanocellulose and its composites, which is pretty well received on campus. This year, I have 14 students in my class, which is a good size for a graduate‑level class. They come from all across the campus. Now I have food sciences students interested in food preservation or packaging. I have civil engineers.
I have chemical engineers. I have chemistry students. It’s a common thread that actually connects everyone together because people see advantage in this. It is new. Everything you do in the area of NASA is new. We’re still exploring this. NASA is where plastics were some years ago now.
We are getting there. It’s not a competition. We have some target that we are trying to get to. All these projects that Mike and I are talking about, they are all student done. Students basically lead the projects, and through that we are just there to help.
Ron: Graduate and undergrad?
Mehdi: Yeah.
Mike: Absolutely.
Ron: That’s great. We like to end with this question on most of our episodes. Let’s go out 5 or 10 years, the concept of a biorefinery. Maybe define what that is. Is that what we’re going to hope to see here in Maine? What would that look like? What could it look like?
Colleen: My vision has always been to see one of these sites at Maine that used to hold a pulp mill be revitalized. We’d have our little cellulose nanofiber production plant. That would be bringing in the wood chips or the wood residuals that we would need to produce that.
It’d be lovely to see little satellite businesses growing up around it, that we’re taking that cellulose nanofiber and processing it to the next step and then sending that onto the consumer. That’s what I’d like to see.
Ron: Are you going to trademark the term Nanocellulose Valley?
[laughter]
Ron: Put it on a t‑shirt, right?
Mike: It’s already there, I guess.
Colleen: I think it is already.
Ron: It probably is. Well, this is exciting stuff and can’t wait to see where it all goes.
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Ron: Thank you all for joining us.
Colleen: Thanks so much.
Mike: Thanks for having us.
Colleen: Thank you, Ron.
Ron: Well, that’s it for this first episode of season nine. All upcoming and many past episodes are available on UMaine’s YouTube channel. Every past episode is available to download and listen to on many of the platforms that most folks use out there these days, Apple, Google, Spotify, SoundCloud, and as we said, more may be coming.
We’re planning on a handful of episodes for the fall, probably about once a month, so stay tuned for what’s next. If you have questions or comments, you can respond on YouTube, or you can send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.