Professional Documents
Culture Documents
How Does One Extract The Finest Cellulose Fibers From Bamboo Without Using Caustic Chemicals
How Does One Extract The Finest Cellulose Fibers From Bamboo Without Using Caustic Chemicals
Surprisingly, especially if you're looking for high-quality undamaged fiber for things like
linen, biological retting of this type is still done in almost all instances; even larger scale
industrial operations will dump their feedstock into a water tank.
The next step is to separate out the fiber. This is where the two methods diverge, and one
option is about as basic as it gets: grab the fiber out by hand. Surprisingly, this operation is
still the dominant method of harvesting jute fiber used for making burlap, which is a huge
industry in India and Bangladesh. Unfortunately, it also requires a lot of people to work for
not very much money, and is generally seen as an unsustainable model once incomes rise
above a certain level.
The other way is to use machines. Mechanical fibers exist to extract the fibers from certain
crops, but the extracted materials tend to be of lower quality - one reason why traditional
fiber businesses using hand-extracted fiber still thrives. Another option that has been
investigated but not widely implemented is to use a low-severity steam explosion. Steam
explosion's a process that's been around for about half a century, mainly used in the pulp
and paper industry, where plant material is exposed to high pressure steam for a given
residence time and then suddenly decompressed. Since decompression occurs much faster
than steam could diffuse through the surface of the material to equilibrate, the plant
material explosively releases the steam.
While in paper processing this normally results in a mush that can immediately be turned
into low-quality paper without any further processing but bleaching (called ground pulp or
explosion pulp) a low severity version's been used before on fibrous crops to replace the
hundreds of workers it would take to separate fibers out by hand. The explosion instead
separates intact fibers from the plant, which can be collected and turned into things like
textiles. I believe a plant for processing flax in this manner was built in Germany in the late
1980s.
--Now, it's possible that I completely misinterpreted your question and you are actually
asking for fibers in the sense that a pulp and paper guy would, which is to say fibrous pulp
or something suitable for fiberboard. In that case, I'd tell you to look at explosion pulp (as I
already mentioned) and pulp produced using the Kraft and sulfite pulping processes, which
use acidic rather than basic primary digestion methods.