The deteriorating climate crisis triggered by high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has led to retreated Arctic ice sheets, rising sea levels, El Ninos and many other climate disasters worldwide. According to statistics, 54 billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted globally every year, with a concentration 50% higher than in the pre-industrial era.

In this context, forests, known as "the lungs of the earth", can provide critical support for alleviating the climate crisis by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen through natural carbon capture mechanisms.

However, nearly 13 million hectares of forests are destroyed each year as a result of human activity.

As a major application for forest resources, the paper industry has a constant demand for wood. Paper, one of the Four Great Inventions of ancient China, acted as a carrier of knowledge and information spread to the world through the Silk Road, increasing economic and cultural exchanges among countries and promoting the progress of humans.

Against the backdrop of economic globalization, the demand for paper in modern society has continued to grow, leading to the cutting down of a large number of trees, disrupting the ecological balance of nature and exacerbating the climate crisis.

Fortunately, it is feasible to turn waste paper into fresh paper, which attracts our attention gradually. Therefore, we hope to make contribution to reduce deforestation and ameliorate the climate crisis by enhancing the cyclic utilization of paper.

However, the difficulty and low utilization rate of the waste paper recycling process are serious obstacles to the sustainable utilization of forest resources.

Over the past decade, China's waste paper recycling rate has maintained at ~50%, while the utilization rate of waste paper has decreased from 72.5% (2014) to 52.4% (2023).

In the paper industry, the recovery and reuse of waste paper mainly relies on a conventional chemical-driven deinking technological process, which is the most intractable problem in the recycling industry because it demands a substantial amount of chemicals, with serious impacts on the environment and workers' health.

With this in mind, we are committed to finding a more eco-friendly, economical and safe alternative method. Our project focuses on tackling the challenges of high cost, environmental pollution and health risks in the current deinking process. We also proposed a standard operating procedure (SOP) for the synthetic biology-dominated deinking technological process: REPARO.

To ameliorate the climate crisis, our project focuses on investigating the current situation and problems of waste paper recycling, providing an unprecedented answer to the bottleneck of recycle utilization, and arousing broad public concern on resource recycling and climate crisis.

Within the REPARO project, we will continue to optimize the paper deinking and wastewater reprocessing technological process to propose future solutions for eliminating handwriting on writing paper.