Paper Goods Company Is Investigating an Alternative to Trees

Kimberly-Clark announced that its researchers have advanced a patented process to turn hesperaloe fibers into material for paper towels. The move comes as manufacturers face increasing scrutiny over their reliance on wood fibre harvested from freshly felled trees. Hesperaloe is a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that grows well in the arid southwest United States. Using this plant could reduce the industry’s demand for virgin tree fiber.

Before settling on hesperaloe, the company evaluated more than seventy candidate feedstocks, including wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. It will now build a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, to produce the fiber at small scale. The pilot will involve local growers to determine whether hesperaloe can be cultivated commercially for tissue products. This step follows more than two decades of internal materials and plant science work.

Kimberly-Clark has invested about $250m (£190m) in the hesperaloe program and has filed more than thirty patents covering the technology. Despite the investment, the company says that products made from the new fiber are still years away from supermarket shelves. Additional research is required to achieve the production volumes needed for global manufacturing. The timeline reflects the usual scale-up challenges for novel bio-based fibers.

Success will depend on whether hesperaloe can be grown reliably on marginal farmland and whether the processing technology can be scaled. Outcomes from the Yuma pilot will determine whether the approach moves beyond the research stage. Until then, the initiative remains a research-intensive effort rather than an immediate supply-chain change.