Agassiz Sustainable LLC, was awarded $100,000 from APUC to help build a vertically integrated wheat straw pulping and molding operation that converts wheat straw into compostable containers for use in the food and beverage industry.
Hua Sun, CEO and president of Agassiz Sustainable LLC, said he is searching for investors who want to turn wheat straw into pulp and make compostable containers for food.
Agassiz Sustainable LLC, was awarded $100,000 from APUC to help build a vertically integrated wheat straw pulping and molding operation that converts wheat straw into compostable containers for use in the food and beverage industry.
“We researched turning wheat straw into wheat pulp and found that wheat straw pulping is very costly and environmentally unfriendly,” Sun said. “We designed a different way to do it, and our method will be environmentally friendly.”
Sun feels it will be profitable since farmers want to sell their wheat straw for a high price. He said there is a lot of wheat straw in eastern North Dakota that isn’t being used for livestock bedding. Some of the straw is being sent to Wisconsin but there is very little profit in it.
“Farmers in eastern North Dakota are sending their wheat straw to Wisconsin livestock producers at $350 a ton for bedding,” he said. “But the farmers are only getting about $30 of that money and the rest goes to trucking the wheat straw. We want to keep that straw in North Dakota and pay farmers well for it.”
Sun said wheat straw pulping was stopped in the 1950s.
“They went to wood pulping. Wood pulping was more like a telephone pole and straw pulp looked like a bush with many branches,” he said.
In eastern North Dakota, wheat straw that is not cut for bedding is often burned or plowed under the ground, he pointed out.
“They burn the straw in the field, or plow it, and that is a waste,” Sun said.
Traill County has a good number of farmers who would be willing to sell their wheat straw for a good price.
Sun wants to make food containers for school lunch programs and to-go boxes.
“I feel there is a lot of demand for environmentally friendly disposable containers,” he said.
Once the facility to make the wheat straw into pulp is built, Sun wants to have several locations around the state, so farmers would not have far to go to take their wheat straw.
“We are excited to make a usable product out of ag waste,” he concluded.
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Agassiz Sustainable LLC, was awarded $100,000 from APUC to help build a vertically integrated wheat straw pulping and molding operation that converts wheat straw into compostable containers for use in the food and beverage industry.
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