Researchers at McGill University in Quebec, Canada are using pulp and paper manufacturing waste to facilitate carbon conversion to be able to make green products. Feeding pulp and paper into their process substantially lessens the energy that would otherwise be required, they say. “We are one of the first groups to combine biomass recycling or utilization with CO2 capture,” says Roger Lin, one of the researchers doing the work out of McGill, and a graduate student in chemical engineering. Lin and research partner Amirhossein Farzi are applying renewable electricity to convert the captured CO2, leaving behind a zero-carbon footprint. This process using green energy, which is in R&D elsewhere as well, is called electrochemical conversion. …“we try to substitute oxygen with a more valuable product – waste from the paper and pulp industry that can be converted to make value-added products in a more efficient and economical way,” he says.