How can grass make your coffee greener? Single use products needn’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth, thanks to an innovative EU-funded project advancing more environmentally-friendly paper production. Climate Change and Environment The Grasspaper project has created a new raw material for the European paper industry, a paper made from grass fibres. The project has now been featured in the new CORDIS series of explanatory videos titled Make the Connection. Paper products are in high demand. About 400 million tons of paper are produced worldwide each year, around half of which is sourced from trees, consuming about 40 % of the global industrial wood harvest. This can contribute to deforestation, harm biodiversity, and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Grasspaper paper and packaging is created from a blend recycled paper and local, fast-growing grass fibres. Its production requires significantly less water and energy than traditional wood pulp-based paper manufacturing. “The CO2 emissions from our production process are close to zero,” says project coordinator Michael Schatzschneider, director of sales at Creapaper. The material has the potential to significantly reduce the impact of paper production on forests, as well as providing an eco-friendly replacement to single-use plastics. ‘Make the connection with EU-science’ is a series of explanatory videos focusing on the scientific content and exploitation aspects of EU research projects. Keywords Grasspaper, paper, grass, fibre, eco-friendly, forest, recycled, water, energy
