Towards Climate-Neutral Papermaking: The FOREST Project and Digital Twin-Based Optimization of Energy and Material Flows, TAPPICon26

The pulp and paper industry faces increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions while maintaining competitiveness. Traditional process optimization methods often focus only on each subsystem, which aligns with the process management of papermaking in general as well. However, such optimization limits the potential to provide sustainability gains. To address this challenge, the German research initiative FOREST (Framework for Resource, Energy, Sustainability Treatment) brings together industrial and academic partners under the Modellfabrik Papier network to develop a holistic digital framework for papermaking.

FOREST aims to create a modular digital twin (DT) of paper machines and their auxiliary systems, enabling real-time mapping of energy, material, and CO2 flows throughout the entire value chain. By integrating physics-based models with advanced data-driven approaches, the framework allows to transparently estimate emission footprints and energy consumption within the value chain of papermaking. This approach provides new opportunities for what-if simulations, scenario-based decision-making, and systematic evaluation of pathways towards climate-neutral production.

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