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Fibre Loss in Recycle Paper Mills: A methodology to quantify in main reject streams and overall fibre balance, TAPPICon25

How to Manage Safety in Today’s Changed Work Environment, TAPPICon25

Validation of a continuous digester anodic protection system

Introduction to Fitness-For-Service applications for the Pulp & Paper Industry, TAPPICon25

Case study: Long-term solution for stopping and preventing stress corrosion cracking in two-vessel digester system, TAPPICon25

Unlocking the Power of Advanced Data Analytics: Techniques and Practical Strategies for Successful Implementations Panel Discussion, TAPPICon25

Beyond KPIs: Harnessing the Power of Data Obscurity, TAPPICon25

Functional Lignin-Based Barrier Coatings for Paper Packaging, TAPPICon25

Recycled Food and Beverage Cartons as a Replacement for Declining Traditional Feedstock in Molded Pulp Production, TAPPICon25

A systems approach for process debottlenecking towards a sustainable pulp and paper industry, TAPPI Journal April 2026

ABSTRACT: Increasing the competitiveness of the pulp and paper industry requires an effective optimization of its existing assets in line with a long-term vision for process transformation, production upgrade, and product diversification. Currently, pulp production increase is one of the main sources of additional revenue for the kraft industry. Likewise, energy efficiency is often employed as a cost-effective approach to reduce operating costs, enhancing the possibilities to lower fossil fuel consumption and contributing to a low-carbon economy. On the other hand, reaching higher production targets and facilitating process transformation, such as biorefinery implementation, heavily depend on the status and performance of a mill’s current infrastructure; therefore, a system analysis is needed to assess the new production requirements, the bottlenecks, and the interactions across departments. In order to obtain practical improvement solutions, direct and indirect impacts on process performance and resource utilization should be considered. This work provides an overview of the key challenges that need to be addressed for production increase and energy efficiency improvement. The methodology starts by a scope analysis for debottlenecking and screening capacity limitations vs. mill targets, followed by their ranking (bottleneck ranking diagram). Benchmarking, gap analysis, and root-cause techniques are applied to diagnose system inefficiencies. This mill-wide debottlenecking assessment is then used to guide the selection of a long-term sustainable operation and design a portfolio of improvement projects by avoiding cross effects of the short-term projects on the long term. A case study of a kraft pulp mill is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.