For a long time, many countries searched for raw materials to use in papermaking. As early as the second half of the 18th century, some Russian factories produced paper from hay and used straw, while a factory in Odesa even ran on reeds — the local newspaper was printed on this kind of paper. In the 19th century, the German Keller tried to make paper from wood chips, and succeeded in 1845. In the 1980s, scientists built a facility for producing paper from birch, aspen, poplar, and maple leaves.
Modern paper and cardboard production requires innovative approaches to the problem of raw material supply.
Today, Ukraine’s pulp and paper industry produces more than 150 types of products, but meets domestic paper demand at an average of only 50%. Certain types of paper for which global demand is growing — newsprint, offset paper, parchment, and others — are either not produced at all in our country or are produced in insufficient quantities. Since Ukraine’s own paper supply isn’t enough, it has to import paper from other countries, mainly Russia.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in using non-wood raw materials to produce fibrous semi-finished products. Such raw material is a source of cellulose and a number of valuable natural products, is renewed annually, and has a low cost.
Plant-based raw materials, particularly agricultural waste, are not put to worthy use. Most of it is left in the fields and burned, causing environmental problems. Today, research into developing technologies that would enable its comprehensive use as a raw material for the pulp and paper industry is highly relevant.
Many developing countries use sugarcane bagasse (the stalks left after sugar extraction), straw, henequen (a plant from the agave family), and bamboo. Non-wood materials are considered an important alternative to wood-based raw material, driven by the growing scarcity of wood and rising prices for cellulose products, especially paper. The world’s largest paper producers are the USA, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, and the United Kingdom. The leading suppliers of paper and cardboard to the global market are Canada, Sweden, Finland, and Norway.
To produce Future Cups paper cups, we use cardboard from the Swedish-Finnish concern Metsä Group.
In Ukraine, the largest companies in the industry are the pulp-and-cardboard plant in Zhydachiv, Lviv region, and the paperboard mill in the city of Obukhiv, Kyiv region. The paperboard factory in Poninka, Khmelnytskyi region, produces school notebooks. Pulp and paper enterprises are also located in Kyiv (a paperboard mill), Rakhiv (a cardboard factory), Kherson (a pulp mill), Izmail (a pulp-and-cardboard plant), Koriukivka in Chernihiv region (a technical paper factory), Malyn in Zhytomyr region (a paper mill), as well as in Velykyi Bychkiv, Perechyn, Svaliava, Korosten, and others.