Canadian based Port Hawkesbury Paper hopes to move ahead with a demonstration sugar extracting operation within a year. The mill has commissioned an engineering study that is nearly complete for the plant, which would be located at the Point Tupper mill site.
Mill development manager Marc Dube said that they’ve been working on the project for some time with FPInnovations, a pulp and paper research and technology institute. “We’ve shipped chips to the FPInnovations Montreal office, had them processed and converted to sugar, then sent to the European partner that we’re working with to be converted into lactic acid and polylactic acid at their test facilities,” Dube said. “We’ve done the engineering of setting up a demo plant, so that would be a plant that would produce up to 500 tonnes of sugar a quarter, that would be used for trials.”
Part of the process would involve investigating other markets for it and other processes to convert the sugar to a product and then develop a business plan to build a site at Point Tupper if it makes sense, he said.
Image credit: Cape Breton Post
