Tuesday, July 16, 2002 (The Star) - MALAYSIA will soon become a majorproducer of high quality paper made from worthless empty palm oil fruitbranches, thanks to Chinese technology.Primary Industry Minister Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik said a Malaysiancompany has come up with the technology to turn the empty fruit branchesinto high quality fibres that were suitable to produce various types oftimber and paper products.“In this trip to China, we found several Chinese machinery companiescapable of turning these fibres into high quality paper.“In fact, we will be starting a test programme with this Chinese companyvery soon to produce brown wrapping paper using 100% palm biomass fibres,”he said in an interview here yesterday.His ministry would be sending 30 tonnes of the raw material to the Chinesecompany in Shanghai, which has claimed that it could make 30 tonnes ofpaper out of the material.The Chinese are known for producing high quality but low-priced machinery.“Our experts will witness the process to ensure that only palm biomassfibres are used. I am very impressed with what the Chinese have shown meand am very excited about the future of the palm oil industry,” he added.Lim said the empty fruit branches were worthless and the 360 palm oilmills in the country gather 30 million of the biomass a year. Some of thebranches are turned into low-grade fertiliser and carted back to theestates but most are discarded.“In most cases the mills have to beg or even pay others to cart away theempty fruit branches but with this new technology the biomass will becomevery valuable.”Lim said the Chinese already had the machinery to make such paper usingdiscarded padi stalks, adding that making paper from empty palm fruitbranches in Malaysia was a cheaper option than using discarded padi stalkor even timber.“All the empty branches are centred at the mills thus paper manufacturersneed not gather the raw materials from all over the place like they do fordiscarded padi stalk.“It is cheaper than using timber or wood chips as there is no need to chopdown trees, pay for logging royalties, loggers and forest rehabilitation,”said Lim, adding that producing paper from palm biomass was 30% cheaper.He said palm biomass fibres could be used to make all sort of papersincluding newsprint, which cost the country about RM2bil a year to import.A factory fitted with Chinese machinery is estimated to cost aboutRM500mil compared with RM6.8bil for the normal paper mill producing500,000 tonnes of paper.He said the biomass fibre could also be used to make multi densityfibreboard and particle board.There was also technology available to turn the trunk of the palm treeinto high quality timber, he added.

(The informations and opinions expressed in this article represent theviews of the author only. They should not be seen as necessarilyreflecting the views of Palm News)