Before you set to work wrapping your Christmas presents this year, you might want to think about how much paper you are using.
Not to put a damper on Christmas spirits, but new research from the Imperial College London reveals that if all the UK’s wrapping paper and festive cards discarded over Christmas could make enough biofuel to send a bus to the moon and back more than 20 times!
According to scientists at the college, an estimated 1.5 billion cards and 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper are thrown away by UK residents over the Christmas period, which could make between 5-12 million litres of biofuel; enough got the bus to travel up to 18 million km.
The study demonstrates that industrial quantities of waste paper could be turned into high grade biofuel, to power motor vehicles, by fermenting the paper using microorganisms. The researchers hope that biofuels made from waste paper could ultimately provide one alternative to fossil fuels like diesel and petrol, in turn reducing the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.
"If one card is assumed to weigh 20g and one square metre of wrapping paper is 10g, then around 38,300 tonnes of extra paper waste will be generated at Christmas time," said study author Dr Richard Murphy from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. "Our research shows that it would be feasible to build waste paper-to-biofuel processing plants that give energy back as transport fuel."
Co-author and PhD student Lei Wang, also from Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences, said: "The fermentation process could even cope with festive paper and card which has been ‘contaminated’ with the likes of glitter and sellotape. The cellulose molecules in sellotape would be broken down into glucose sugars and then fermented into ethanol fuel, just like the paper itself. Insoluble items like glitter are easy to filter out as part of the process."
Dr Murphy added: "There’s more work to do to assess the effectiveness and benefits of the technology, but we think it has significant potential."
The full study results are published this month in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Energy and Environmental Science.
The scientists say that the fermentation process using cheap enzymes could be scaled up to convert around 2000 tonnes of waste paper per day into biofuels.
