Investigation of several surfactant use strategies to improve the hydrolysis of glucan in newspaper

Newspaper represent a large quantity of a relatively cheap and available source of lignocellulose. Newspaper could enzymatically be hydrolysed into fermentable sugars for further bioethanol or biochemical production. Low glucan conversions (20-50%) have been generally found in literature, thus this led to the investigations of multiple pre-treatments to improve sugars release. Surfactants such as sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS), Tween 80 and polyethylene glycol represent a relatively low-cost pre-treatment to improve newspaper hydrolysability. Several surfactants use strategies were tested using the 3 products mentioned earlier. A simple mass, cost and energy model was developed to determine the optimum surfactant pre-treatment. SDS wash using 0.5% SDS based on total solids (TS) gave the most promising results: it released 82 kg of the cheapest produced sugars (0.7£ kg-1 sugar).