Carbohydrate-based fillers and pigments for papermaking: A review

The replacement of traditional mineral fillers and pigments with environmentally friendly carbohydrate-based organic materials is beneficial to paper recycling, bioenergy production from paper or deinking sludge, alleviation of abrasion of paper machine wire and paper cutters, etc., yet there are still some technical barriers or challenges associated with the use of these organic materials in such aspects as manufacturing costs and structural stabilities. In this paper, the emerging technologies of carbohydrate-based fillers and pigments for papermaking are reviewed. The carbohydrate-based fillers and pigments available in the literature are based on starch, cellulose, disaccharide, xylan, or carbohydrate-rich ligno-cellulosic forest residues, while the starch-based fillers and pigments have been the most frequently reported. The mineral fillers surface-modified with carbohydrate-based materials is not included in this paper as inorganic minerals are the major component of the modified fillers.