Re: Pulp Mill Dioxins/Chlorine; Enzyme Lignin Remover

[ttweed@wildrockies.org (Tony Tweedale)]

joy, the big hit against enzymatic pulping-delig is the narrow operating
conditions/vulnerability to upsets (T, pH, toxins, etc) , but from the
little reading I've done, that doesn't seem to be a serious barrier.  The
trade magazines are full of articles of trial projects, so I imagine there
must be some commercial operation up and running by now.

The economics are unreal, not just in chemical savings (energy cost built
in) but in energy savings.  This is based on nature's ability to use energy
thousands of times more efficiently than man.  It's photosynthesis and
enzymes (both specializing in bonds and atomic valence shells that ideally
match the energy levels in the bonds of the molecule being worked on) that
accomplish this.  Studying the flow of sunlight through the trophic levels
of an ecosystem is something I've never accomplished, but a summary I read
was phenomenal, not only in showing the efficiency of the system, but in
how energy (sunlight) dictates the form of an ecosystem, by definition an
complex one.

The applications of enzymes to technology are incredibly vast and the
potential enormous. Man uses ~ 1/8,000 th the energy that falls on the
surface on the earth ea day (btw showing the absolute needlessness of using
harmful fossil fuels); nature could give us what we get for our energy
expenditures for a millionth of the sun's daily bounty, I bet).

Parenthetically, it's also sunlight and the tilt of the earth that drives
every aspect of weather.  More energy falls on the equator on average
(earth is actually closer to the sun in the N. hemisphere's winter),
setting up weakening waves of evaporation -> condensation -> precipitation
that move towards the poles (there are deserts and jungles all around the
world at certain latitudes, e.g. rain forest at the equator, deserts at
Peru/Australia & Death Valley/Sahara/Gobi, and rain at the "roaring
forties").  (this is part of how POPs move to the arctic).  This large
scale system interacts w/ 1) the vortex in the atmosphere created by the
slip of the atmosphere under the earth's rotation, stronger at the poles
(the jet stream, which expands & contracts and drives weather systems and
is also a root cause of ozone depletion as it locks in cold air that
creates ice crystals that act as surfaces to catalize ozone destruction by
halogens when the sun's u.v. finally appears in the spring); and 2)
interacts with pockets of high & low pressure air that move (ie, wind) up
or down according to how they are heated or cooled, this also contributes
to rain [low pressure (heated) system rising, creating condensation of
water vapor] or to clear weather [opposite].  I wont even get into the
feedback systemes between global warming and the depletion of the ozone
layer (like CFc's absorcing I.R., or that warming the tropshere means less
heat reaches the stratosphere, leading to more O3 destruction per the
above)--just think of the atmosphere as a very dynamic single system, from
which we breath in 12 times as much weight as we eat food.


>=====  A message from the 'pulppaper' discussion list  =====
>
>>Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:37:39 -0600
>>To:dioxin-l@essential.org
>>From:hope@igc.apc.org (Joy Towles)
>>Subject:Pulp Mill Dioxins/Chlorine; Enzyme Lignin Remover
>>
>>Note:  The following article is correct in essence, but we know that to
>>eliminate the formation of dioxins, pulp and paper mills must stop using
>>all forms of chlorine, including chlorine dioxide.
>>        Does anyone on our list know if the enzyme process described below
>>is being used in any pulp or paper mill in the U.S.?