Manufacturing-grade cellulose made from cow dung

The advance by a team of researchers from UCL, Edinburgh Napier University and Teesside University could help farmers overcome challenges presented by disposing of dung.

Published in The Journal of Cleaner Production, the study describes the new ‘pressurised spinning’ innovation and its potential to create cellulose materials more cheaply and cleanly than some current manufacturing methods, using dairy farm cow dung as the raw material.

The advance is the first time that manufacturing-grade cellulose has been derived from animal waste.

Common material

Cellulose is found in the cell walls of plants and was first used to create synthetic materials in the mid-19th century.

Today it can be found in products including cling film, surgical masks, paper products, textiles, foods and pharmaceuticals. Though it can be extracted organically, it is also often produced synthetically using toxic chemicals.

Pressurised spinning (or pressurised gyration) is a manufacturing technology that uses pressure and rotation simultaneously to spin fibres, beads, ribbons, meshes and films from a liquid jet of soft matter. The technology was invented in 2013 by a team from UCL Mechanical Engineering led by Professor Mohan Edirisinghe.