How simple can circularity be? Alucha extracts lime from waste paper to use in paint, glue and plastic

Paper waste is full of calcium carbonate, a type of lime, which you can still use perfectly well in paint, paper, glue, rubber or plastic. Dutch scale-up Alucha is extracting that substance from paper sludge to help large companies such as Essity, AkzoNobel, Dyka and Bostik reduce their CO2 emissions and become circular. Construction of a new demo plant could begin soon once the company has the financing in place.

How simple some circular solutions can be. You take a filler from the waste from paper mills and sell it to paint and glue factories, which can use it to meet their climate and circular goals. That's the idea behind Alucha.

With another name might have been easier

Ceo Gijs Jansen started the company in Barcelona in 2004, when he was doing his MBA studies there. 'We started by recycling beverage cartons in Spain. From that we extracted aluminum. That's where the name Alucha comes from. 'Alu' stands for aluminum and 'lucha' means struggle in Spanish. We thought it would be a struggle to get this done. In hindsight, we would have been better off calling the company Alu-easy. Then it might have all been a little easier," he says.

Alucha built a demo plant for recycling beverage cartons, did a nice project, but ultimately the market proved too small to set up a business for it. At the paper mill, meanwhile, Jansen saw the trucks with waste sludge driving off the premises. So the idea was born to come up with a solution for that. After he and his family moved back to the Netherlands, he started Alucha.

Mine from Alucha now also in Brabant

The paper industry uses almost 90 percent waste paper to make new paper and cardboard. However, that old paper contains fillers such as calcium carbonate, which is used to make the paper white or shiny. Those substances often end up as waste in paper sludge, of which 9 million tons are burned or dumped annually in Europe. That creates a considerable amount of CO2 emissions, because calcium carbonate contains much of this greenhouse gas.

At the same time, new calcium carbonate is being extracted worldwide from limestone and chalk mines, in Europe for example in the Alps. Such a mine is now also at Alucha in the Brabant municipality of Cuijk, near Nijmegen. Only there the calcium carbonate is not cut from limestone rocks, but separated from paper sludge via pyrolysis technology and reused.