Developments in Mechanical Pulping of Bagasse for Manufacture of Newsprint, 1995 Pulping Conference Proceedings

S. G. Rangan & G. Rangamannar

Beloit Walmsley Ltd.

Newsprint prices have gone up all over the world and the use of bagasse for the manufacture of newsprint seems to be an economically viable option. The bagasse newsprint must contain substantial amount of mechanical bagasse pulp to give the necessary optical characteristics to the paper. This paper examines in detail further improvements done in the past 15 years for getting a better and more uniform quality pulp from bagasse. These improvements are targeted to minimize current problems such as non uniformity of bagasse fibers, load fluctuations in refiners, inconsistency in strength and optical properties and variations in shive contents. Today’s Newsprint paper machines are designed to handle weakest paper webs without breaks at an acceptable speed. With these improvements it should be possible to use high proportion of bagasse pulp for the manufacture of newsprint. This will result in production of economically acceptable quality newsprint and more bagasse based Newsprint Projects will be installed in Cane Rich Countries.