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AbstractPrecipitation of sparsely soluble calcium oxalate causes scaling problems in the pulp and paper industry. A potential solution is to degrade the oxalic acid using oxalate-degrading enzymes. Four novel fungal oxalate decarboxylases were evaluated in experiments with 16 pH-adjusted bleaching filtrates collected from mills producing mechanical pulp or kraft pulp. The enzymes were also tested in five of the filtrates from mechanical pulping at authentic pH and elevated temperature (55°C). The enzyme that performed best in the screening was selected for a small-scale experiment performed in a mill producing mechanical pulp. The enzyme degraded 70% of the oxalic acid in the fresh filtrate after one hour, without pH adjustment and at the prevailing process temperature (65°C). The new enzyme performed considerably better than the well-studied oxalate decarboxylase fromAspergillus niger, which only degraded 4% of the oxalic acid under the same conditions.

The effects of ionic substances in seven industrial filtrates from kraft pulping, mechanical pulping, and sulfite pulping on the activity of oxalate oxidase from barley were investigated by pre‐treatment of the filtrates with ion‐exchange resins prior to enzymatic degradation of the oxalic acid in the filtrates. The pre‐treatment resulted in increased oxalic acid degradation rates in all filtrates, except for one that was obtained from sulfite pulping. The possibility that lignosulfonates, which were present in the filtrate from sulfite pulping, could affect oxalate oxidase was investigated in a separate set of experiments involving four different preparations of lignosulfonates. At a lignosulfonate concentration of 50 mg/mL and a pH of 3.8, only 2–16% of the activity of oxalate oxidase remained. The results show the effects of anionic and cationic substances in bleaching filtrates on oxalate oxidase and indicate that there is an interaction between the enzyme, which has a positive net charge at pH 3.8, and the polymeric anionic lignosulfonates.