Koskisen is a Finnish wood industry company producing sawn timber and panel products, such as birch plywood, furniture, and construction boards made of chip board. Koskisen uses Stora Enso’s bio-based binder, NeoLigno by Stora Enso, to replace fossil-based resins used in furniture boards. Source: Timberbiz
“The glue in wooden panels has been non-renewable for decades. It has been very cost efficient and hard to replace with bio-based materials. We have studied different bio-based options for years at Koskisen, and now we have been able to take big steps forward with NeoLigno by Stora Enso. It is the most promising binder in bio-based gluing, and the first bio-based binder that can be integrated into our product,” said Eemi Valjakka, Product Manager at Koskisen.
Both the furniture board raw material and the binder are made of wood and sourced from the production process flows of both companies. This results in all raw materials of the Zero Furniture Board being bio-based.
The co-operation with Stora Enso offered a unique opportunity to address this issue: the lignin-based NeoLigno makes the Zero Particle Board bio-based. It is an excellent opportunity to bring something new into the market.
Being bio-based, Zero Particle Board is an excellent example of a circular economy product. At Koskisen, the main raw material of the panel, wood chips, come from its own production. Similarly, Stora Enso gets lignin from their Sunila pulp mill in Finland, extracted in connection to pulp production.
Combining these two ingredients, brings something new and valuable to market.
“We have now been working with Stora Enso for two years, and we are finalizing and optimizing the production of Zero Particle Board in Järvelä, Finland. Our target is to launch the commercial product and deliveries to our customers in autumn 2022. Once we have launched the furniture board to our customers, our intention is to extend the use of NeoLigno also to plywood. I am very much looking forward to extending the range of our bio-based products,” says Koskisen’s CEO Jukka Pahta.
