# Non-wood fibres and grown packaging

How fibre length, ash and silica cap non-wood papers at stationery grades, how mycelium replaces sheet formation with grown foams, and where each is genuinely better than wood pulp or expanded polystyrene.

Sheet-making physics does not care what the fibre is — fibre geometry does — and the niches of grass paper, algae paper and mycelium packaging are the exact shape of their raw material's geometry and economics.

Source: https://en.bioecon.ru/docs/forestry-biomaterials/cellulose-lignin/bio-stationery-algae-paper-mushroom-packaging/
Updated: 2026-09-07



Sheet formation is the same everywhere: a dilute fibre slurry drains through a screen, water menisci pull the fibres together, and [hydrogen bonds](../paper-bio-dry-strength-agents/) set the strength. What changes between feedstocks is the fibre itself — its length, wall, cleanliness — and the logistics of getting it to the machine. Wood pulp occupies a sweet spot: millimetre-scale fibres, no silica, a supply chain that stores for years. Non-wood materials enter with different geometry and different economics, and their markets are the exact shape of those differences.

## Fibre geometry sets the ceiling

Grass, straw and crop residues bring fibres of roughly a millimetre against the three or four of softwood tracheids, a large fraction of short non-fibrous cells, and silica with ash that interferes with pulping, drainage and chemical recovery. Harvest is seasonal and low in bulk density, so collecting a mill's worth of residue is a logistics problem wood never poses. The consequence is mechanical: shorter fibres share less bonded area, so residue papers cannot reach the tear and tensile of wood grades, and they live where that does not matter — stationery, printing specialties, packaging accessories. Algae is a step further out: lagoon biomass is largely not cellulose fibre at all, and algae paper works as a fraction blended into a wood-pulp sheet, contributing colour and texture rather than strength. What algae genuinely supplies is on the input side: the harvest is an environmental service — nutrient removal from an over-fertilised lagoon — so the feedstock is collected regardless, and paper is what the collected nuisance becomes.

## Mycelium: growing instead of forming

Mycelium packaging abandons sheet formation entirely and with it the whole paper machine. Fungal hyphae colonise a lignocellulosic substrate — husks, sawdust — inside a mould, binding the particles into a low-density composite over days; heat then kills the organism and dries the part. The physics is a grown foam: cushioning where expanded polystyrene is used, heavier per unit volume, but formed to shape with almost no pressing energy and compostable at end of life. Its limits mirror the mechanism. A foam cannot be a web: there is no tensile sheet, no print surface, no reel to convert. The material is hygroscopic and needs coating against moisture. And production runs at a biological rate — days per batch where a paper machine produces tonnes per hour — so it fits shaped protective parts, not commodity tonnage.

## Where the niche is honest

The honest cases are the ones where the alternative was never good. Lagoon algae would be dredged anyway; field residues are burned in the open where collection is absent; expanded polystyrene is unrecycled in most of the world. In those places the new material is not outcompeting a champion but absorbing a waste stream — the strongest version of the story, and the one the long-lived producers in this space actually tell. What keeps the tonnage small is equally honest: dispersed seasonal feedstock, low bulk density, and fibre geometry that caps mechanical grades. The paper physics does not bend for any of them — grass paper wicks, sizes and weakens exactly as the [sizing](../paper-bio-sizing-agents/) and strength rules predict. The limiting quantities are fibre dimensions for the papers, and for the mycelium the trade between density, moisture and biological throughput.