Keynote on trends and drivers influencing innovation in the paper industry presented by Marco Lucisano, VP Papermakinga and Packaging, RISE Bioeconomy, at the 54th Annual General Meeting and Seminar of the IPPTA, in Dehli, India, on March 23rd 2018.

1. Research Institutes of Sweden
TRENDS AND DRIVERS
INFLUENCING
INNOVATION IN THE
PAPER INDUSTRY
Marco Lucisano
RISE BIOECONOMY
This is a keynote presented at the 54th Annual General
Meeting and Seminar of the IPPTA, in Dehli, India, on
March 23rd 2018. We have added speech bubbles to
guide you through the slides.
Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or
comments: marco.lucisano@ri.se

2. 2
16.085.000.000
Let us start with a question: what is 16 billion?
16 billion something?

3. 3
Since this is a presentation about the future, one could assume that we
are trying to describe a vision for the future, or maybe a forecast.
Naturally, both visions and forecast are interesting, yet neither forms the
base of our way of working with foresight work.

4. 4
To us, studying the future is like training to drive a car in a foggy day. When
you do it, you rely on your experience of interpreting signs and signals.
Indeed traffic signs are designed so that we can understand their meaning
even when we just can see their shape.
When you have trained and you manage to react quickly to what happens
around you, then you can drive home safely. Or, leaving the world of
analogies, steer your company to a successful future.

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Global
trends
Scientifically
possible
One valuable approach when talking about the future from the perspective of a science, technology and
innovation company, such as RISE, is to describe interesting intersections between global trends in
business and society with scientific and technical developments which are reaching the tipping point to
implementation now and towards 2025 – 2030.
This presentation is based on our latest study “A
Cellulose-Based Society”, a study of trends and
drivers influencing the development of new
materials in a circular bio-based economy.

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TRENDS UNCERTAINTIES SCENARIOS
Trends, uncertainties and scenarios are three of the elements of an all round discussion
about the future. This presentation focuses on trends only. Additionally I will present a few
examples of things happening around us today, which can serve as food for thoughts.

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The city norm
Urbanisation is maybe more to be regarded as a fact
than as a trend. Urbanisation generates a number of
consequences and opportunities which have the
connotation of trends. Let’s have a look at one of them.

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The need of nature
Yet, even as we crowd into cities and adopt urban ways of life, our need
for Mother Nature’s presence in our lives does not seem to be diminishing.
On the contrary, nature has been proven to have remarkable effects on our
health and well-being. Our inherent emotional longing for the natural also
seems to increase as we move towards a denser, more restless, fast-
paced and tech-savvy society. What we need to understand is what idea of
nature we urban dwellers have about nature when we long for it…

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This is one example from Sergels torg, one of the most central squares
in the modern part of Stockholm. As a happening a Swedish company
paved the square with real green grass in early September 2016, to
unleash, run barefoot, lay down on a blanket, play games and kick ball.
Hopefully the citizens of Stockholm do not consider the grass to be an
instance of nature.

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This is another example of “Mother Nature” taking place in an urban environment: il
Bosco Verticale (the vertical forest), two residential towers in Milan, Italy, designed
by Studio Boeri and opened in 2014. As recently as on March 21st 2018, these
buildings were used as an illustration of the International Day of the Forests
organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
with focus on Forests and Sustainable Cities.

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No waste
The general trend against the
generation of waste gets more and
more evident by the day. This is
particularly evident in the
discussions on the presence of
plastic waste in the ocean waters.
The war against waste could very
well be a trend with positive effects
for the paper industry, if it can
provide reliable alternatives with
more positive sustainability profile.

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Shift happens
Which business is your company
going to be in tomorrow, and which is
business segment in which tomorrow’s
competitors are active today?
The photo illustrates noodles, made
out of cellulose. They have no taste,
no smell and no calories – is their
producer active in the cellulose-based
business or in the food business?

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No more plain Janes and average Joes
In most categories business opportunities
tend to present a bell-shaped distribution,
with a peak somewhere in the middle. Yet in
business after business we can observe
viable opportunities emerging both at the
very low end and at the very high end, and
all of it as the same time.
In the photo, paper based-jeans by the
Swedish company Nudie, with 31% paper
threads. Appropriate for a papermaker, of
course, and absolutely on the high-cost
side. At the same time, companies in the
low price, fast fashion segment are thriving.

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Business activism
We call “Business Activism” the
trend exemplified by companies
that start to take an increasingly
active role in the pursuit of a
sustainable world on both
business and ethical grounds.
This has a particularly large
impact at a time when both
politicians and consumers are
perplexed and disagree on the
correct ways to lead development
in the right direction.

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Innovation by collaboration
The challenges of today are
complex and even developing
new technical solutions for
specific problems is often outside
of the possibilities of one single
company or organization.
The trend is clear, collaboration
within a sector, among different
businesses and very often even
among competitors.

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16 085 000 000 USD
So, do you remember this question? what is 16 billion?
Need a clue? It is US dollars. So what is 16 billion dollars?

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Let us move over to a couple of examples to help
illustrate what is happening around us. Let’s start in
the UK, where this man, Hugh Fearnley-
Whittingstall, an English celebrity chef and TV-
personality, in one episode of his series Hugh’s
War on Waste opened the discussion on the issue
of disposable coffee cups.
The TV-program was broadcast in late July 2016.

18. One of the symbols and accessories of modern
urban life, we use a lot of them: 2.5 billion cups per
year in the UK alone.

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Recycl-able
Although recyclable, in principle…

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Recycl-ed…they very seldom are, actually, recycled. Estimates range from 0.25% up to 1% (UK figures).
Separate collections schemes are absent, the logistics of material flows is not optimized and the
cup themselves have not been designed to be actually recycled. They are a typical take – use –
waste-product, cups are either landfilled or incinerated.
So a TV program in the UK, started a debate on a very clear issue of non optimized use of
materials, an issue which has been in plain sight for everyone for years.

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Since the program was aired the largest effort in the UK to collect and recycle coffee cups was
started in London in spring and summer 2017: the square mile challenge. Environmental charities,
a recycling association, major coffee shop chains, offices and organizations and local authorities
joined forces to collect 5 millions cups. This happens just 7 months after the initial call to action by
the Hugh’s War on Waste TV program.
In our words, this is the power of the City Norm and Innovation by Collaboration at work.

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And if you go shopping at Selfridges, your paper bag actually used to be your coffee cup. An
initiative in collaboration among James Cropper (a papermaker), Veolia (for material handling),
Selfridges and many more.
In our words, this is the power of Innovation by Collaboration and Business Activism at work.

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This is by no means a problem for the United Kingdom alone, it is a global one… and here a very
recent piece of news: Starbucks committing 10M USD for greener coffee cup solution.
All of this happened within 20 months from broadcasting the BBC program om the problem with
coffee cups.

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Let us have a look at a second example: food to go! This
is a picture of food trucks parked on campus at the
Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where our
offices are located.

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Here we see yet another modern urban phenomenon:
home delivery of ready food. I have ordered a significant
number of alternatives to perform a non-scientific study
of the packaging solutions used.

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80% recycled material
PLA
Moulded pulp
Unknown
plastic
Al Paper
This is one example from my empirical study: is it really
the best solution to ask consumers to handle six different
materials? What are we supposed to do with the
packaging we get home with food deliveries?
Is there any alternative? Could there be one?

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This is something else happening around us:
Amazon has a new service introducing in-home
delivery…

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And yet another example goes even further: in-fridge delivery! This does solve delivery
to the very last mm. And since someone is about to start delivering inside our houses,
could they not take packaging materials away, for recycling? And by doing so
guaranteeing a high precision of sorting? Would the value of materials be conserved?

29. Let us conclude by talking a little about time! In particular let us talk about the time it
takes for a new idea, a new possibility to be realized in an innovation generating value
in society.

30.  1980’s: 30.000 kWh/ton
 2010’s: 1000 – 2000 kWh/ton
30
Nanocellulose
As an example, we can consider nanocellulose, a class of cellulose materials with very attractive
properties both in papermaking and in a variety of other fields. This material was considered an
academic curiosity in the 1980’s, because of the large amount of energy needed for production.
Large research and development efforts all around the globe, have now solved the problem – the
specific energy needed has been reduced greatly and several nanocellulose variations have
become commercially available products!
In the past 30 years, research has effectively managed to increase energy efficiency 30 times!

31. In the same period, other branches of science and technology have had a completely different rate
of development. Here we see Moore’s law: the number of calculations per second per constant
dollar has increased 1.108 times.
There is a clear difference between 1.108 times and 30 times!
Is it even relevant to compare this way? Or is there anything we could do differently in the way the
paper and fibre based industry carries out its innovation programs?

32. Could we use the pilot scale facilities available in the business to accelerate the rate of innovation?
Not a little – a lot?
This is the pilot papermaking line at RISE Bioeconomy in Stockholm, one of very few open pilot
lines for fibre handling and papermaking.

33. A few years ago we developed new process technology for stratified forming, a papermaking
technology which would allow papermakers to produce paper grades with engineered sheet
structures (in the illustration, a 60 gsm paper with magenta fibres on one surface and cyan fibres on
the opposite one.
Instead of initiating development at small scale in a laboratory…

34. We started at pilot scale… we designed headbox elements out of this type of material – yes, it is
roofing material for greenhouses…
One we understood the real challenges at large scale and relevant flow conditions, then and only
then we went back to the design table and to the laboratories to performed focused experiments.

35. In another example, we wanted to add these particles (ZnO-tetrapods) to a paper web. Naturally
you can do it in a laboratory…

36. Or you can start at large scale and when you do that you need a team that understands how to do
development work at the edge of what is known…

37. Most papermakers do not look like this when handling regular paper, and you may still want to do it
if you are trying to develop something completely new, like…

38. …paper with ZnO, which you can see in this micrograph. And when you do have this kind of paper,
then you have a completely new class of materials with exciting properties – for example it can
become an active substrate for printed electronics and not just a carrier for print.
Moreover, by starting development at pilot scale you know from the very beginning that this is
something that can be produced in conventional papermaking. A huge advantage for
implementation.

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16 085 000 000 USD
So, do you remember this question? This is…

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16 085 000 000 USD
Amazon’s expenditure for technology and content during 2016: “Technology costs consist
principally of research and development activities including payroll and related expenses for
employees involved in application, production, maintenance, operation, and development of new
and existing products and services…” according to the company’s annual review for 2016.
Could this be one sign indicating why some branches of technology show extreme accelerations?
What could we in the paper business learn from other area of technology with a remarkably
different pace of innovation?

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Global
trends
Science
Technology
Order your copy of A Cellulose-Based Society: www.Innventia.com/cbs

42. Research Institutes of Sweden
TRENDS AND DRIVERS
INFLUENCING
INNOVATION IN THE
PAPER INDUSTRY
Marco Lucisano
marco.lucisano@ri.se
RISE BIOECONOMY