Nanocellulose is a material that is extracted from wood fibres. It has exceptional strength properties, being more or less as strong as Kevlar, a light weight material.“For a long time, there’s been a great deal of interest from industry in utilizing nanocellulose as a strengthening component in other materials, such as paper, composites and plastics,” relates Mikael Ankerfors, Research Manager at Swedish research company Innventia. “We can also create new, more effective, environmentally compatible and renewable barrier films for packages used for foodstuffs.”Nanocellulose, a super material, is going to have many areas of use in the future. For example, it can be used to make membranes and other reserve parts for the human body. It can also be used as a provider of viscosity in foodstuffs; in other words, it is able to replace carbohydrates and other additives in foodstuffs, which are known as low calorie products.For the first time, nanocellulose will be able to be produced on a large scale at Innventia in Stockholm, using a new process being economically efficient. Previously, the homogenizing stage in the process was much too demanding, when it comes to energy. Due to the process developments carried out by Innventia, the energy consumption has been reduced by a total of 98 percent.Recently, researchers at the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology, KTH, and the Wallenberg Wood Science Center, WWSC, in Stockholm have succeeded in creating magnetic nanoparticles in super-strong nanopaper. The new nanopaper is extremely light, strong and flexible and can, among other things, be used to prevent the forgery of paper money, and also to filter off metal particles."Magnetic nanopaper is easy to produce and has unique characteristics, but it also demonstrates the potential product research within multidisciplinary nanotechnology that has for the forest industry," says Lars Berglund, head of WWSC and professor of fiber and polymer technology at KTH.Besides the fact that magnetic nanopaper can be used to prevent the falsification of documents, there are other applications of interest, for example for implants in the human body and for small motors and sensors.