Sustainable Nonwoven Materials by Foam Forming Using Cellulosic Fibres and Recycled Materials

Sustainability issues of nonwoven materials can be considered in processing as well as in raw material choice. Nonwoven materials have been prepared using wet-laying for decades, but water usage can be reduced by replacing water with aqueous foam. With foam higher fibre consistency can be used compared to water. Foam also improves dewatering in forming section leading to lowered drying needs and, thus, energy saving. Foam laid materials has extremely good formation leading to very homogeneous materials even with low grammage products. Another possibility is to make bulky products. Cellulose based materials, mainly cotton, viscose and cellulose fibres, are covering only around one fifth of the raw materials used in nonwoven field. In recent years there has been incentive to find more sustainable and environmentally friendly materials to replace cotton and synthetic materials with man-made cellulosic from dissolved pulp, such as viscose. Also traditional viscose process, utilizing H2S can be replaced by more environmentally friendly options such as lyocell using NMMO solvent, which is already commercial process, as well as carbamate and enzymatic biocelsol processes. In this work we studied use of foam technology in nonwoven materials preparation with textile grade fibres. We also demonstrated how recycled paper could be used and raw material for nonwovens utilizing dissolving, carbamate and wet-spinning process. In this presentation advantages of foam forming over wet laying and air laying are discussed and properties of foam formed materials, made using commercial cellulosic fibres as well as fibres made from cardboard, are presented.