A Swedish startup has turned Kraft paper into a structural material that can replace plastics, metals and composites. With €40 million in EU backing, the world is starting to pay attention
There are press releases that land in your inbox and make you sit up. The one from PaperShell was one of those. A Swedish company is making a fully recyclable, structural material from all-natural materials that has recently been backed by €40 million in EU funding. Could this be the truly circular material that will one day replace the ACM and plastics that our industry depends on with a 100% carbon-free circular solution? It was worth a conversation with the man behind it.
Watch the full interview with Anders below
Anders Breitholtz is one of the founders and CEO of PaperShell, and his background is not what you might expect. He spent the best part of two decades as a material tech scout for Fortune 500 companies, travelling the world hunting for advanced, sustainable materials that industry could actually use at scale.
Bringing the nerds together
He tells me, “I was fed up. Writing another report, doing another workshop, and being in another delegation about what we need to do to transition towards sustainability goals. I thought it was a lot of blah blah blah. Instead of talking, I wanted to build something with other like-minded nerds that could really develop something.”
PaperShell started with a simple but stubborn idea. Across every sector Anders worked in, whether automotive, construction or sports, companies had made public commitments to move away from fossil and mineral-based materials. The problem was the same everywhere.
“There are plenty of really cool materials out there, made out of algae or some other clever stuff. But the volumes weren’t there. Or it was the same old greenwashing,” he says.
The answer was to look closer to home. Scandinavia has vast forestry resources and deep knowledge of cellulose chemistry. Rather than turning trees into paper and stopping there, he asked whether you could do something more with it.
The result is PaperShell. Layers of Kraft paper impregnated with hemicellulose, a natural binder found in any plant or tree, pressed under extreme force until they converge into a single homogeneous material. No epoxy. No phenolic resin. No fossil inputs.
Anders explains, “The technology is actually from the late 1800s. Before we were making plastics out of oil, there were experiments using cellulose and hemicellulose. On one side it is known chemistry. On the other hand, we are combining it with state-of-the-art science and research.”
So what can it actually do?
This is where it gets interesting for the sign and print market. Anders describes PaperShell as a 3D High Pressure Laminate (HPL), essentially a laminate that can be formed into complex shapes rather than only flat panels. In practice it behaves like sheet metal and can be pressed into curves or kept flat in the same way aluminium composite or Dibond panels are used today.
“All the stuff you can do when you are pressing a metal sheet into a shape you can do with PaperShell. If you have something that has been press-moulded somehow, like ACM, then you can replace it with PaperShell. Signage was not a market we were particularly focused on at the start of development, but it has become clear it is one that could benefit hugely from our technology,” he continues.
Early durability testing tells its own story. Back in 2018, Anders took one of the first pressed samples, put it through a dishwasher and then into a freezer. He did that 50 times. When he weighed it afterwards, he could not detect any moisture gain. Paper that does not absorb water. That was the moment things got interesting.
Left outside, the material does not break down. It turns silver grey over time, much like untreated wood, but the structure holds. The company even tested UV penetration at a particle accelerator in Sweden to prove it.
What it means for sign and print
The company has already been testing PaperShell as an ACM alternative, and the results are promising. The material can be pressed as a flat panel with a white top layer suitable for printing, and Anders confirms that milling and cutting have been tested with standard tooling.
A recent experiment caught his attention. Someone printed directly onto the natural black-brown surface of PaperShell, without any white base layer. The colours stood out in a way that nobody expected. Spray painting has also been tested as an alternative to a laminated white surface, and both routes are on their way to market.
For print businesses weighing this up against aluminium composite, the environmental argument is clear. PaperShell is 100% biogenic. ACM, by contrast, uses mineral-based aluminium (mined and shipped globally before processing) bonded to a polypropylene core. Recycling a laminate of two different materials is difficult, and Anders suspects most ends up incinerated, with only the aluminium recovered.
On cost, Anders is upfront. The company is not yet at full production scale, but the strategy has always been to reach price parity or just above incumbent materials once the new factory is running. If the material is going to make a real difference, he argues, performance, aesthetics and price all have to stack up alongside the sustainability credentials.
From forest to forest
The circular story behind PaperShell goes further than most. Production waste currently goes to biochar, a stable, carbon-rich form of charcoal, which is then used as a soil enhancer for young trees planted in urban environments. It is already happening. All blanking waste from the factory is collected, converted and sent to what Anders calls a plant school.
The company is also experimenting with mycelium to see whether the material can actively accelerate plant growth when returned to the ground. At a recent exhibition in Milan, Italian company Arper showcased PaperShell’s circularity with a stand that included a restaurant serving risotto made with mushrooms grown on the material’s waste.
If the material cannot be composted, it is recognised as wood and goes into the wood recycling section at any standard recycling facility. Because essentially, that is what it is.
Anders reflects, “From forest to forest. We were hunting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but could we also create a material flow that replaces high impact materials, and where end of life goes back into nature?”
The €40 million vote of confidence
Earlier this month, PaperShell was awarded €40.3 million from the EU Innovation Fund. The application ran to 874 pages, put together with EY, and Anders admits the team applied for it partly to structure their five-year plan rather than with any real expectation of success. First application, first award.
The grant will fund a new 15,600 square metre factory in Sweden, highly automated and designed to scale production properly for the first time. For a company that has spent five years proving the concept across automotive, furniture, sports equipment and flat panel applications, it is both a significant validation and a serious set of new obligations.
“Eight years ago if someone had said to me, Anders, you will be building a 15,600 square metre factory made of wood with solar cells on the roof, I would not have believed them. But it’s true and now we have to deliver on it,” he says.
Why it matters beyond Sweden
Anders is not shy about the bigger picture. He talks about European reindustrialisation, about proving that sustainability and competitiveness are not in conflict, about building something his children’s generation can point to.
He adds, “It is so dystopian when you turn on the news. One driving force has been for our kids. Cool stuff like snowboards, vinyl records. We can work with circularity and at the same time build European resilience.”
For the sign and print industry, PaperShell is worth watching closely. A fully biogenic, structurally capable panel material that can be pressed, shaped, printed on, cut with existing tooling and returned to the earth at the end of life is game-changing for the industry and its impact on the planet.
Anders Breitholtz has spent eight years building towards it, and the further he has gone, the more the scale of the opportunity has humbled rather than inflated him. “The more I worked with materials, the more humble I became towards nature. You have 3.8 billion years of product development in nature. The more you look at insects, birds, trees, soils, you realise we are so far away as humans from being anywhere close to that intelligence. To work with these materials is to just scratch slightly on the surface of it,” Anders concludes.
PaperShell is a company that could be quietly saving the world. From a factory in Sweden. Made of wood.
EU backs PaperShell with €40.3 million Innovation Fund Grant