SuPaP: Enabling resource recovery and Sustainable wastewater treatment for the Pulp and Paper industry

The pulp and paper (P&P) industry is an important global industry. Nonetheless, the P&P processes are highly demanding on water and energy.

Therefore, the P&P industry requires more sustainable production techniques to reduce its environmental impact and increase its resilience against climate change challenges.

Recent research shows that through anaerobic wastewater (WW) treatment from P&P mills, Swedish biogas production could increase significantly.

However, there is still potential to improve the anaerobic bioreactor treatment capacity and increase biogas production. Also, the P&P industry traditionally uses aerobic biological WW treatment, missing the WW recovery potential.

SuPaP aims to minimise greenhouse gas emissions, increase WW treatment capacity and resource recovery potential present in P&P WWs.

The project objectives are 1) to propose and validate a new P&P WW treatment approach that enhances the energy and resource recovery and the treatment capacity during anaerobic WW treatment for the P&P industry; 2) to enhance the understanding of the link between process operating conditions and microbial community structure taking place in biofilm reactors during anaerobic WW treatment for volatile fatty acids and methane production.

The knowledge and expertise of project partners will be applied to demonstrate the proposed solution capabilities and identify opportunities for its implementation and dissemination to other P&P mills.