Just 15 per cent of the European Union’s lignin output, a paper-industry by-product typically burned as waste, could displace the heavy-metal preservatives used across Europe’s 6.5 million cubic metre pressure-treated timber market, with University of Copenhagen researchers securing DKK 15.5 million to scale a non-toxic alternative ahead of the EU’s 2030 biocide phase-out.
That is according to Emil Thybring and Sune Tjalfe Thomsen, both associate professors at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, who have been awarded the Innovation Fund Denmark Grand Solutions grant to commercialise a process they call “hyperlignification” alongside Frøslev, Denmark’s largest construction-grade timber supplier.
The technology dissolves lignin, wood’s natural binding agent, in alcohol at concentrations far higher than in previous attempts, and forces the saturated solution into the timber under pressure, blocking fungal decay and reducing moisture absorption, without the copper formulations standard at hardware retailers.
“It makes perfect sense to take a global industrial by-product,” Thomsen said.
In laboratory trials on pine and beech exposed to the most aggressive wood-degrading fungi under optimal growth conditions, untreated wood lost 50 per cent of its mass to decomposition, whilst hyperlignified wood lost only 1 per cent.
The Grand Solutions funding follows last year’s Evergreen Prize for Innovation, a major European competition that delivered EUR 300,000 to advance the work, with the HYPERLIGNO project officially launched on 1 April under a framework that runs from laboratory through to industrial application.
It comes as Wood Central reported the European Union is moving towards a 2030 phase-out of biocides in wood that will force producers across the bloc to find alternatives to the copper formulations now sold across hardware retailers, with pressure-treated timber often shipped to Germany for end-of-life incineration.
Wood Central understands the European pressure-treated timber market consumes approximately 6.5 million cubic metres of timber annually, with the heavy metals introduced under pressure subsequently leaching from the wood into surrounding soil and waterways — the precise problem Thybring and Thomsen are aiming to solve.
“We work with much higher concentrations, which truly saturate the wood,” Thybring said.
The HYPERLIGNO team will now identify the optimal lignin source from European paper mills, with Thybring and Thomsen targeting a Frøslev-supplied commercial product before the EU’s 2030 biocide deadline tightens around the bloc’s 6.5 million cubic metre pressure-treated timber market.
