Australian wheat and hardwood fibers for advanced packaging materials

Abstract Alternative crop fibers have shown great potential for paper applications, especially packaging. We demonstrate Australian wheat straw processing using a Regmed MD-3000 disc refiner to produce mechanical pulp fibers and assessment by making 60, 120 and 300 g/m 2 handsheets. Wheat fibers and spotted gum fibers were then enzymatically sized (hydrophobized) by esterification to reduce the surface spread of water by 51 % and 36 %, respectively. Coffee pods (300 g/m 2 equivalent) were manufactured using a thermoformer to demonstrate the versatility of mechanical wheat straw pulp fibers as a sustainable resource for food packaging application.